Ed O’Brien has spoken to NME about how overcoming a period of depression and his “dark knight of the soul” shaped his healing new album ‘Blue Morpho’, as well as the comeback tour and future of Radiohead.
The guitarist released his acclaimed debut solo album ‘Earth’ under the moniker EOB back in 2020. With his own struggles and a return to Radiohead in between, he described the six years since as “a bit up and down but very good recently”.
“I’ve enjoyed making a record, I’ve enjoyed living some life, I’ve enjoyed being a dad, I’ve enjoyed going through a tough period,” he told NME. “Everybody has those moments in life, but I came out the other side and I was thankful for the experience really. I feel like it’s part of the journey of life. To be able to meet it full-on with my good fortune, it’s nice to be able to come out of the other side and feel more whole.”
That “tough period” came about when the second COVID lockdown slammed the brakes on life and provided O’Brien with an enforced period of reflection and a conversation to be had with a lifetime of suppressed demons.
“I didn’t have a choice,” he admitted. “I think you have to find out what the roots of the depression are. I was reading Gabor Maté’s book, When The Body Says No. He basically advocates that depression, auto-immune diseases, cancers – they all have their seeds in childhood. We shut a lot of stuff down because we don’t process it. In that second lockdown when we couldn’t go anywhere, it forced me to be in that dark place, sit in it, feel it, not be scared of it, and really confront my fears.
“Obviously it was really hard. It felt really, really challenging, but the thing that I leaned into was that I’ve had a spiritual practice for a while now, about 20 odd years. Meditation is the keystone of that. Any friend of mine that’s ever going through it, my first question is, ‘Do you meditate?’ It’s the single most powerful thing that we can do. I believe they should be teaching meditation at schools.”
As well as “the simplest and most profound form of meditation” by sitting and watching your breath for 20 minutes each morning, O’Brien also found the solace to work through his issues amidst the healing power of nature around his rural Welsh home.
“That involves being in cold water in nature, walking and awakening,” he shared. “I’ve always been a country boy and loved the outdoors, but I just feel that mother nature is not only extraordinary but so profoundly healing.
“One of the problems we have as a modern society is that we are so detached from mother nature. All of our decisions are made by people in towns and cities. I’ve lived in both, but there’s something about the countryside and the power of the seasons.”
He added: “We’ve lost sight of that. I’m in awe of this planet that we’ve been gifted and that we live upon. Listening to birdsong, finding stillness in mother nature, that’s what I leaned into.”
Living a life without “a boss or a 9-5 job”, O’Brien had the rare privilege of time and space, claiming that this allowed him the freedom to face his depression head-on. “I didn’t have to medicate so I could really feel the pain of it,” he told us. “I could feel the darkness, I could walk across the fire. That takes time. There are no shortcuts. We live in a society that wants instant gratification.”
O’Brien, now 58, shared that his 30 years of keeping busy by making and touring nine albums with Radiohead and his role as a husband and father helped him to “defer” and “basically keep the ghosts at bay”.
“Then that second lockdown hit, the ghosts tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘It’s time to process this, it’s time to acknowledge this stuff’,” he said. “When you feel it, then you can process it. It’s Dante’s Inferno. Midway through life, I lost myself in the woods.”
Having found his way through to the other side, O’Brien said he feels as if he’s now “grown” and is “more whole” compared to the man he was during our last interview in 2020. “If I hadn’t had that experience, you’d be talking to another version of the guy you spoke to six years ago,” he admitted. “That guy didn’t realise how lost he was. He wasn’t really being honest with himself.”
If this period of enforced stillness had come earlier, say if Radiohead had taken a more significant break in the ‘00s or 2010s, would he have gone through a similar process?
“That’s a good question,” the musician replied. “We actually took a year out in 2012, and that’s when my family and I went to live in Brazil. It didn’t happen then. I was 44, and having a five-year-old and a seven-year-old was all consuming. It was full-on and we were immersed in trying to be a family. There wasn’t the space for it to come through and it wasn’t ready.
“The older I get, the less I believe in chance and serendipitous moments. I’ve had health crises along the way and I’ve always been trying to get better. Mental health and depression are always something that I’ve struggled with over the years. I thought that I’d kept it at bay with my meditation, but sometimes your body just goes, ‘OK, you’ve done so much, but we’re gonna hit you with a big one’. You can handle this. I’m a big believer that time is everything.”
He added: “You lock stuff down from your childhood. My body and soul just said, ‘This is unsustainable’. If you want to be well, if you want to be whole, you need to look at this stuff and process it.”
In doing so, O’Brien found himself questioning the way in which we as a society discuss and deal ‘male mental health’ – finding the term itself and the platitudes that tend to come with it insufficient given “the levels of pain that people are feeling”.
“That phrase, ‘male mental health’, it’s so fucking inadequate,” he argued. “It’s so ‘meh’, it’s so beige. [You’re experiencing] the fucking depths and those words do not do it justice. It’s like the blanding-out of mental health.”
Along with medicine and therapy, O’Brien said that the full scope of what a recovery can involve needs to be considered by society, especially the spiritual side. “We are spiritual beings living in a physical body,” he argued. “Lots of people suffer and it’s not framed in the right way.
“I’ve spoken openly about my depression in the past and young people have come up and spoken to me about it. I’ve said, ‘You know what? Given the world that we live in, given everything, the most legitimate response to it is a form of despair and depression because it’s so fucking shit’. We’ve got the crudest form of capitalism that we’re all living through, it’s playing out in wars and we’ve reached this ridiculous point in history.”
O’Brien added: “We know it’s not serving the planet, this beautiful home. We know it’s not serving people and people are so upset, fragmented and tortured that I don’t want to use ‘mental health’. Our leaders carry on as if it’s business as usual. And they wonder why people are so disenfranchised by politics? It’s because the whole fucking system does not make for happy people or a happy planet.
“People take their own lives to escape from that pain. Society doesn’t really want to look at what the causes are. The causes are the fucking system that puts people under huge amounts of pressure, debt, strain. Humanity is going to look back in 500-600 years and look at our time and go, ‘Look how one-dimensional they were’. Every society thinks they’re the most advanced, but we are fucking pathetic. We are capable of extraordinary things, but the system keeps us shackled to this unsustainable path.”
Following the thread of “extraordinary” in humanity and nature is what runs through O’Brien’s new solo album ‘Blue Morpho’, released last week. Named after a butterfly native to Brazil and associated with starting over, the record emerged from the musician’s “dark night of the soul”, driven by his newfound sense of purpose.
“Part of me was like, ‘What the fuck am I even doing?’” he told us, looking back to 2020. “I’d just put out ‘Earth’ and I felt dissatisfied with aspects of it. I was asking myself, ‘Can I do this?’ I also really wasn’t expecting to re-enter the Radiohead fold again. ‘What am I now? What is my life?’
“My one purpose, aside from being a father and all that, was to try and bring some beauty into the world; and to celebrate things of beauty. Whether that’s mother nature or some of the things that human beings are capable of doing. There’s enough darkness in the world, it’s about bringing beauty and light.”
As well as falling in love with lyric-writing “in a way that I’ve never really appreciated”, O’Brien also found his other “musical family” in producers Paul Epworth (Paul McCartney, Adele, Glass Animals) and Riley MacIntyre (Ezra Collective) alongside contributions from the likes of Shabaka Hutchings on flute, The Invisible’s Dave Okumu on guitar and ESKA on additional vocals.
“This album and the process of it has shown me that I’m going to be doing this until the day I die, whether people want to hear it or not,” said O’Brien. “I love making music, I love what it does. The process at times was deeply uncomfortable, and that’s what I love about it. I didn’t used to like that nature of it, it was just something to get through. Now I see how it serves a purpose.
“I want to make another record and I’ve got more than enough ideas for the next one.”
Sharing that it “probably” won’t be another six years until album number three – given that his period as a “hands-on” dad getting his kids through COVID, GCSEs and A-levels is now at end with them aged 20 and 22 – his focus is on touring ‘Blue Morpho’, and letting the songs take on a new life on stage.
“One of the great things about coming from the spirit of Radiohead is having no fear of fucking up,” he admitted. “There was to be some jeopardy. There might be some horrendous moments musically, but it doesn’t matter because you’re seeking these moments of transcendence which involve elements moving in different ways.”
Given all of his reckoning over the last six years as a man, a father and an artist, was the idea of going back on the road with Radiohead for their lauded 2025 comeback tour daunting at all, or was he ready and refreshed for the challenge?
“It was just so amazing,” O’Brien replied. “It was daunting of course because everyone wants to make it work and the last time we’d done it [in 2018], it wasn’t great. We’re so blessed that people want to see what we do, but at the heart of it, it’s five people.
“I felt very strongly about it and said, ‘If the love between the five of us is there, then everything flows from that and we’ve got no worries’. The songs can kind of play themselves in a way, but if there’s the love and that feeling between the five of us, and there was and it was glorious. Playing in the round, everything was in the centre and it flowed out from that. Everyone could feel it.”
So much so, that O’Brien enjoyed and appreciated his place within Radiohead so much more. No wonder they’re already planning to “20 shows each year” on a different continent from next year.
“If I’m honest, I’ve always felt insecure about my singing compared to Thom [Yorke]’s, in being the only guy who sings harmonies with his amazing voice,” he confessed. “In the earlier days we had a string of monitor engineers and I couldn’t hear myself sing so I had deep-rooted insecurities. But the great thing about singing lead vocals and having to work on that in the studio is that by the time you come to doing backing vocals with Radiohead, it seems so much easier.
“I loved it. I loved the confidence of thinking, ‘I’ve got this’. Being able to sing, being nuanced, it was amazing. I felt that I could meet Thom vocally for the first time. We could actually do some of the stuff that I might have backed off from 10 years ago.”
At this point, we asked O’Brien if he felt his increased confidence would in any way bleed into the songwriting of Radiohead’s next album, the long-awaited follow-up to 2016’s ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’.
“Where did you get this idea that there’s another Radiohead record?,” he replied, laughing. “I know it’s so funny and it comes from a good place. People want to hear another Radiohead record. I can’t even imagine it because we’ve not even talked about another record. I think that’s because the last record was so fucking awful to make! The tale of that record is so fucking dark. It casts a long shadow. Maybe ask me in six years time!”
For now, O’Brien ended by saying that he was simply feeling “lucky as a musician and a creator”, and to be in a place of peace.
“Whether it’s depression, a health crisis, mental health, breakdowns, all these things, there’s always a before and after,” he concluded. “I resonate more with the after; the after feels good.”
‘Blue Morpho’ is out now. O’Brien’s UK and European tour kicks off in October. Visit here for tickets and more information.
For further help and advice on mental health:
- “Am I depressed?” – Help and advice on mental health and what to do next
- MITC – A collective of musician industry therapists
- TONIC Rider – Bespoke training and support for music industry professionals
- Help Musicians UK – Around the clock mental health support and advice for musicians
- Music Support Org – Help and support for musicians struggling with alcoholism, addiction, or mental health issues
- YOUNG MINDS – The voice for young people’s health and wellbeing
- CALM – The Campaign Against Living Miserably