Conor O’Brien finished the song on a nine-hour boat journey from England to Holland. He pulled out his lyric-filled notebook and scribbled down the final lines for Beatitudes. “The devil in the detail is dancing at her feet,” read one. Months earlier he was sailing off the coast of Canada when he wrote a song entitled In a New Found Land, You Are Free. Sometimes the inspiration is cryptic and occasionally it’s obvious, but O’Brien maintains that everything in his life feeds into his music.
“Personal is a funny word in writing,” says the frontman and often sole member of Villagers. “When I’m writing a song, the reason it’s so much effort and time is that you’re trying to write something that comes from a personal place but is worthy of an audience — that it will have some value for people, instead of you just getting shit off your chest.
“Some songs may be personal initially, but I want them to be social creatures, not isolated. I read a lot of that when I was doing English at college. It was all about the poem as a social being rather than an isolated entity. I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s true, I’m going to do that.’ ”
Becoming a Jackal, Villagers’ acclaimed debut album, was influenced by the books and music occupying O’Brien at the time. Lately, he’s been reading a lot of the late humanist author Kurt Vonnegut; listening to finger-picking guitarists such as Dublin’s Cian Nugent; and forcing himself to follow international affairs while on tour. It’s all seeping in. Until a few months ago, O’Brien thought it would be another five years before the second Villagers album, but now the ideas are coming thick and fast, and he’s scheduled recording sessions in December.
A theme is emerging — and Beatitudes fits it. The song is about taking the easy way out by believing in an afterlife. It looks at the emotions that lead to this belief. Becoming a Jackal was about a perspective from ground level, taking an everyday event such as a bus journey and turning it into something more significant. The new songs are looking down from on high, examining why we do, instead of what we do.
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“It’s not about religion,” he says. “Religion is a result of these things. I’m trying to deal with the impetus. That’s the reason songwriting is important, because it can think about the heart of matters rather than the social results of them. I’m more interested in why people believe certain things. The shit that’s going on around the world, in terms of insurrection and war, even right now in our little island, you can’t ignore, either. The reasons behind that are quite interesting to a writer. I’m dealing with that as well.”
Touring was useful for throwing up inspiration, but now O’Brien needs to stop and write. There is still the demand from fans and venues but he’s grown tired of singing certain songs and is sick of howling, as he is required to do at the end of Pieces. In September, the singer is retreating to his home in Malahide.
“We’ve worn this album out as much as it can go,” he says. “I don’t want to feel like a workhorse and keep doing the same thing. There’s only so many ways you can reinterpret an album and songs. It feels right to stop now. I don’t want this band to be in people’s faces all the time, we need to go away for a while. I have so many ideas now and my notebook is filling up and I feel like I need a couple of months of turning the phone off.”
The next album is shaping up to be a collaborative affair, a concept that once made the Dun Laoghaire native uncomfortable. His songs may be social creatures but he is not. On tour, he attaches himself to bandmates who do the mingling for him. He recorded almost every instrument on Becoming a Jackal himself, which gave the album an added kudos. Yet, after hearing the songs performed over and over, he now believes that was a mistake. The band’s members have written some of their own parts for the new songs. “It’s taken nearly two years of touring. I trusted them from the start — but a little bit of me didn’t,” he says with a guilty laugh.
Becoming a Jackal’s title track won this year’s Ivor Novello award for best song musically and lyrically, but O’Brien is unsure if he’ll ever be comfortable with that level of attention. He doesn’t think the new batch of songs will be as radio-friendly and, as he prepares for his biggest headline show, at Dublin’s Marlay Park on July 23, he’s been thinking about how “big” he wants Villagers to get.
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“Beach House [the support at Marlay] — that blows my mind. A little piece of me feels like I don’t belong at that level,” he says. “Another piece of me thinks the opposite. When we did the Elbow support in front of 10,000 or 15,000 people, I felt good; I felt the songs were translating to people. We know how to play to that kind of audience. [Marlay Park] will be cool, and it’ll be our last proper show in Dublin for a while. It feels like a good way to end it.”
Although he has learnt how to make a large venue feel intimate, there are sacrifices and concessions that O’Brien won’t make. “When you’re writing a new album and you’ve reached a certain level of ‘success’ [he draws quotation marks in the air], there are people whispering in your ears, going, ‘If you want, you could do this and you’d be on a whole other level.’ And you’re thinking, ‘What other level? Will they let me into certain clubs? What is that?’
“I don’t think you’re going to see me doing things to try to get bigger musically. If anything, with the new songs, I can imagine our radio plug just going, ‘Oh shit.’ I just want to do whatever rocks the band and people in my immediate circle. I’ll trust that.”
The new songs have grown organically, beginning with O’Brien’s desire to sing something new, and ending with his band throwing in their two cents. As with the first album, on which he also did all of the artwork, O’Brien will be investing a large part of himself. The December recording session will cover only half the tracks but he already has plans for drawings, a multimedia element and more personal music videos.
“I don’t think we’ve quite nailed our music-video aesthetic yet. I did my own animated music video for The Meaning of the Ritual. I really liked that because I felt it came from the same place as the song. Then we started calling new directors and the label got involved,” he says. “My favourite is the last one, by Myles [O’Reilly]. It lets the song speak for itself, which I think a video should do. But with the other ones, they’re good but I think they were trying to force an idea.”
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If there are bands to listen to and bands to get into, then Villagers belong in the latter category. That ‘difficult’ second album is still a while away, but if you catch them this summer expect some poignant tunes, not as old as the better known Beatitudes but arguably just as wise.
Looking over his shoulder
Cian Nugent
Conor O’Brien describes the young, largely unknown, Dubliner as “a genius”. Nugent gave the Villagers frontman a copy of his new album, Doubles, a month ago and O’Brien says he stayed up until 3am, having listened to it four times in a row. “I’m trying to get as good as him on guitar, which is why all the new stuff is getting finger-picky,” he says. “I feel like I’m in competition with him.”
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James Vincent McMorrow
Some Villagers fanatics loathe this Irish singer-songwriter because of his similarities to O’Brien. Although both musicians have their roots in folk, McMorrow’s style is more rugged and traditional. Early in the Morning, his debut album, is making waves abroad and the bearded troubadour will headline a gig at Dublin’s Olympia in October.
Villagers play Marlay Park, Dublin, on July 23