Conor O'Brien of Villagers: 'I would prefer to exist before the internet'
Conor O'Brien of Villagers.
Conor O’Brien is gearing up to get back into album mode as his band Villagers release their fifth album in August. Fever Dreams is the result of about four band sessions that ended up being a race against time.
“The very last day of recording was the first day of the first lockdown,” O’Brien says with relief. “It just was perfect timing. In terms of my own little creative world, it was great being able to lock down with all these files of really great musicians making crazy sounds and just sorting through them all. That took up probably 80% of my lockdown life.”
2020 was always likely to have been a bit of a lockdown for O’Brien anyway as he plugged away at an album (“I would have liked the odd blowoutr”). He tried multiple versions of the songs, added some layers, finished the lyrics, but ultimately, the body of it came from those pre-Covid sessions. Is he ready for critics and fans to project the pandemic onto the album anyway?
“It's probably gonna get so tiring,” he admits.
During a 50-minute conversation on Zoom, the internet feels all encompassing. O’Brien mentions setting up an official Villagers TikTok account but after only a handful of posts, deciding he’s too old for it.
“I'm not really TikToked yet, but I'm not sure if I ever will be.”
Of social media in general, he's somewhat wary: “It's changing the way we think. I would prefer to exist before the internet. I'm trying to read only books which were written before the internet existed right now, because I think there's a difference in the way they use language... I think the last decade has really affected our articulacy and our intellects and our abilities to think critically.”
Put all of this railing against screens together and it’s little surprise when O’Brien says there’s an escapist nature to the songs on Fever Dreams.
“It was all about trying to escape modes of thought that you felt like computers were taking over your brain and you weren't actually thinking to your highest capacity that you used to.”
However, even after just a few cursory listens, Fever Dreams sounds like a love album and continues a lush sound that O’Brien has discovered in recent years. The development of Villagers has been fascinating to watch over the past decade-plus.
“I'll never stop criticising my previous work,” he says. “Maybe with the first album [Becoming a Jackal], I was probably trying to be Dylan sometimes and then probably trying to be Leonard Cohen sometimes.”
This being O'Brien's fifth album as Villagers, does it all come to him more easily now? “The first thing that comes to mind there is that my focus has changed in the last five years or so to writing stuff that I think will help to some degree,” he says. “I've started to realise that music is just about affecting the individual and the person listening to it, you have to sing to the individual.
"You're not singing to a large crowd of people, you're singing to somebody's mind and how they process it.”
O'Brien has been listening to a lot of jazz in recent times, which he says has changed his perception as to what music can do. Indeed, the influence of jazz - O’Brien cites late Duke Ellington in particular - is no more evident than on Fever Dreams’ second single, ‘So Simpatico’, a seven-minute track that goes, well, full-on jazz.
Explaining that it’s important not to lose sight of the song, O’Brien says: “There's actually not that many words in the song, and that was a real struggle for me, because I had to sort of reteach myself how not to try and make an involved narrative.”
Indeed, 'So Simpatico’ is a track that may well point to the future direction of Villagers. “I think I see myself more trying to simplify, and trying to just really boil things down to their essentials musically, and present that, rather than something you might have to... diffuse or something before you can understand.”
It’s strange to hear O’Brien, who’s won the prestigious Ivor Novello award for his songwriting previously, planning this change. “I had a prolonged adolescence, I think, mentally in my head, and I definitely felt with the first album, that adolescent feeling, even though I was in my mid to late 20s at that stage. I had that feeling of like, 'I'm going to show them! I'm going to show the world how much pain I've been through and they don't even know, none of them know!'. But it made good songs. I'm proud of it.
“It's just that there was a very different energy and it's something that I'll never, ever go back to because I'm older,” he says, explaining how humility has become a bigger part of his life since that debut album.
To coincide with the album release, O'Brien is hitting the road for a UK tour, before kicking off a series of Irish dates in Cork Opera House in November.
He is aware of the public's renewed appreciation of live music following lockdown. “I think there'll be a really nice warmth in the room this time around. I think we all kind of need that a little bit.”
- Villagers' So Simpatico single is released soon. The album Fever Dreams is due on August 30. Villagers play Cork Opera House on Nov 3, followed by a number of gigs at other Irish venues
“I like the Paris Review podcasts. They do really cool sound collage things, which can sometimes be annoying, but can sometimes be incredible. There's a podcast I'm listening to at the moment called This Jungian Life. I'm into Carl Jung at the moment. It's just interviewing lots of Jungian analysts. It's a bit hit and miss for me.
“I'm reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, which I've been meaning to get around to for a long time. It's just such beautiful writing, but it's so dense. So I'm so slow reading it. And I'm reading loads of Audrey Lorde as well, who is an amazing American writer from the mid 20th century. It’s a collection of hers called Sister Outsider, which I'm really into. And Carl Jung's Red Book, which an ex-boyfriend of mine gave to me years ago when he was working in a bookshop.”
“Inhuman Resources on Netflix. Eric Cantona was in it. I was rewatching a few Seinfeld episodes. I just love it so much. It's one of those shows that you don't know if somebody you know will either hate it or love it, which I find hilarious, because I can see why people who hate it, hate it. But it's what makes me love it so much. It's just so ridiculous.”
