Music: Villagers

Conor O’Brien chats to Jeff Hemmings about his new album

Awayland is the acclaimed follow up to the the Mercury-nominated Becoming A Jackal. Already a number one in Ireland, Conor O’Brien aka Villagers, has once again come up with a beautifully crafted, literate and emotionally intelligent record that speaks about rebirth and rejuvenation following a relentless touring schedule that followed the release of his debut album.

“I tried to write everything from the perspective of a newborn baby; given the gift of language, what would he or she say? For a while I thought the record would be called ‘Birth’, and the album cover is an image of a little boy looking out to sea, but I think that the album is about reclaiming that sense of curiosity and wonder which we have when we are children and we often lose over the years,” says Conor.

“I felt like I needed to flip on its head the idea of what music is for myself, if I was going to continue making it, and I didn’t know that I would. After two years of touring I recognised the cycle, so I sat down and thought about that, and I started feeling like the worst writer in the world. I felt like I was lying to people – there is no way you can sing “my love is selfish” a hundred times in a year and it continue to feel pure and true.

So I began to make musical landscapes, and listened to lots of widescreen instrumental music like Lalo Schifrin, David Axelrod and Jean-Claude Vannier and lots of krautrock and funk music – there is something about the repetition of rhythms that really hit me. The lyrics were very much secondary in creation of this album; they were a servant to the music. I think they benefit from this.”

These last 30 months or so has seen O’Brien nominated for a Mercury Prize, winning an Ivor Novello Award, sharing stages with artists like Neil Young, Tindersticks and Fleet Foxes, and contributing to A Harbour Of Songs, a record and project curated by The Unthanks’ pianist, producer and arranger Adrian McNally.

“I felt like I was reintroduced to electronic music in the last year and a half. When I was a teenager I was obsessed with artists like Aphex Twin, Portishead, ADF, Tricky and Björk, and a night out dancing in Berlin inspired me to listen exclusively to techno for a couple of months – Plastikman, Drexciya, that early Detroit sound. I liked that aesthetic for a while. I think I was attracted to being emotionally gratified by something that was less about the expression of the individual ego, and more about the textural sensation of having a collective experience.”

O’Brien’s songs have become the lighthouse he sings of; a way to navigate, using a deeply philosophical impulse to uncover truths. “I am singing the things I am not able to say, yet I think that my favourite song on the album is the one with no words [‘Awayland’], because it is the purest thing I have ever written.”

The Old Market, Sunday 17 February, 7.30pm, £12.50