This spring, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien released a beautiful and soul-stirring album called Blue Morpho, and in this episode, he shares with great depth and candor what inspired the album, his approach to recording it, and the transformative self exploration required to make it. One of the elements of the project was his desire to capture sounds at 432 Hz, and you’ll hear him explain the idea behind that, right at the beginning of the interview. But from there, we go way back into his history as an artist, to his early childhood listening to Simon & Garfunkel with his mom while she sewed, singing in the boys choir, discovering guitar music and freaking out over bands like The Jam and The Police and The Smiths, and while still a teenager meeting and forming a band with the group of school friends who would become Radiohead. Honestly, this interview is one of those occasions, when I can’t believe what an honor it was to hear from an artist whose music has been so important to me personally, and for him to share about the artists that had similar impact on his life. There’s an incredible story right near the end of the episode where Ed talks about being on tour with Radiohead in the US in 1995, and having all of their gear stolen. So they took a fateful trip to San Francisco to get some new guitars and things, but they only had one audio cassette to listen to during the road trip, and the music that was on it ended up inspiring some of their approach to OK Computer. You’ll have to listen all the way through to find out what was on that tape.

Conor Oberst, Part Two – LSQ

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