Name

Ed O'Brien

Description

Ed O’Brien likes to quote a line from the great Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry: “To know the dark, go dark.” It is the insight, after all, that ultimately led O’Brien from one of the darkest spans of his life to Blue Morpho, his absorbing second solo album. To wit, as soon as O’Brien’s solo debut was out, he heard its faults. That was April 2020, the month O’Brien turned 52 and the month the world began to reckon truly with what it meant to be shut down.

O’Brien regretted that he’d waited so long to record those songs, putting them on pause for the better part of a decade to accommodate the schedule of his teenage band, Radiohead. Some of its impulses had been lost in the gap, and there was only so much he could do to support his first album—Earth, released under his initials, EOB—as the world confronted catastrophe.

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