Conor O’Brien of Villagers: ‘We’re seeing extremely tribalistic thinking from all sides’

Conor O’Brien, the one-man cottage industry behind Villagers, thinks about it a great deal. “It is absolutely insane, what we’re living through,” he says. “The history books will show what [harm] the internet age did to our intellect and our ability to communicate, but also to our ability to dream and have imaginative worlds within ourselves.

“All of that, right now, is being assaulted to a certain degree. It’s not all negative, but I do think it’s a fertile ground for me in terms of songwriting.”

Such thoughts fuel Villagers’ new album, That Golden Time, which will be released next week. “In the absence of church-going and religious pursuits,” O’Brien argues, “we’re worshipping the marketplace instead. We’re worshipping ourselves, we’re worshipping our identities, we’re worshipping what it is that divides us from one another. That’s being monetised and sold back to us.”

Many of his thoughts centre on social media and there’s an arresting line in the title track about “algorithm blues” and the “dulling of the mind.”

“I can’t stop thinking about all that stuff,” he says. “And maybe it comes from getting older. But I feel like it’s sort of not allowing us to take things in context. I’ve retreated from social media, personally — I just use it to promote my Villagers work — but during Covid, I was drinking lots of wine and posting all sorts of opinions and getting embroiled in arguments. And you know what? So much time is wasted. You could be reading a book. You could be going outside, touching grass, or just communicating in the old-fashioned way with people.”

He pauses for thought. “For a while, we were all quite drunk on this thing. When you think about it, we’re only at the beginning of this internet age, but already we’re seeing extremely tribalistic, simplistic thinking from all sides of all arguments.”

What O’Brien says next would likely inflame some when taken out of context, but in the course of a long conversation, he explains himself fully. “I absolutely hate it when people still wear the Repeal badge,” he says, referring to an item that seemed to be everywhere in the run-up to the abortion referendum. “I hate it so much because it’s kind of saying, ‘F**k you, you stupid religious people who disagree with me for your own personal reasons’. I think you have to have some sort of respect for the opposing opinion. And I’m not seeing a huge amount of that, especially in the arts world.”

Many people in that usually progressive world no doubt share O’Brien’s view, although few would feel comfortable airing it publicly. For instance, a couple of hours after our interview, I bump into another Irish musician who says (off-record) that they were troubled by last week’s open letter signed by 400 artists urging Ireland’s contestant, Bambie Thug, to boycott Eurovision. “Easy to be principled,” this artist told me, “when you’re not the one affected. There’s real pressure to jump in line.”

O’Brien came to public attention in the mid-2000s as a member of acclaimed Dublin band The Immediate. The quartet’s first and only album, In Towers and Clouds, enjoyed extremely positive reviews on its 2006 release, but the band split a year later, citing creative differences.

Having served as guitarist for Cathy Davey, he went on to found his own band, Villagers. It’s had a floating cast of members ever since, but everything centres on O’Brien. After signing to the respected English label, Domino, the first Villagers album, Becoming A Jackal, was released in 2010. It was nominated for both the Mercury and Choice music prizes.

Since then, Villagers’ output has been characterised by its quality. That Golden Time is studio album number six. There’s also a fine live recording, Where Have You Been All My Life?, which features a memorable cover of the evergreen Wichita Lineman and was recorded at London’s RAK Studios.

O’Brien has put his own stamp on several covers, including, memorably, a live rendition of Abba’s Angeleyes with John Grant. One of his most treasured pinch-me moments was when he got to sing the great anti-war song Shipbuilding alongside its writer, Elvis Costello, at London’s Royal Albert Hall. “I was really nervous. Donal Lunny was playing with us and he was just really comforting to me,” he says. “He was such a friendly face, saying, ‘Relax, it’s going to be great’.”

Lunny, a veteran of Planxty and Bothy Band, plays his trademark bouzouki on That Golden Time, while American songwriter Peter Broderick contributes violin.

Lately, O’Brien has been going down a Joni Mitchell rabbit hole. “That album with Both Sides Now on it [Clouds]. Hejira, too. I can’t stop listening to her stuff because it’s so free. I remember seeing an interview with Dylan where he talked about a stage of his career where the songs were just flowing out of him. It was the same with Joni Mitchell. Listen to those albums from the late 1960s and the 1970s and there was creativity flowing in her veins. She was struggling to get it out fast enough — you can hear that in the way the words are put together. It’s like something else was flowing through her and she was just the conduit.

Happy as O’Brien is for the release of That Golden Time, he admits to being even more excited about the publication of his debut book later this year: “I guess it’s because it’s a new thing.” Passing A Message — which takes its title from a song on Villagers’ second album, Awayland — collects the lyrics of all his songs. It is being published by Faber & Faber, whose historic roster includes several of the greatest poets of the 20th and 21st centuries.

O’Brien is especially tickled by the fact that Faber published Seamus Heaney’s extensive oeuvre. “[New track] You Lucky One started with me watching a documentary about Heaney in my folks’ house at two in the morning. I never realised how prominent he was was in the British media during the Troubles. He was constantly on BBC. Here was this huge figure, an extremely articulate Catholic Irish writer being brought over to the UK to do BBC shows.”

O’Brien’s songwriting spark was soon fired. “There must have been such interesting board meetings about that while the violence was going on,” he says. “On the song, I was trying to imagine the strange, complicated conversations that were happening in the corridors of power. And then, it became this whole other story about a parasitic kind of person, who’s trying to get someone to abandon their ethics in the pursuit of material wealth or whatever.”

From the off, O’Brien has placed considerable emphasis on the quality of his lyrics. “I’ve been a little bit precious sometimes, but I try to make sure they’re good enough before anyone sees them.”

He is in a similarly perfectionist mode when recording. The entire album was recorded in a makeshift studio in his apartment near the centre of Dublin and yet there’s nothing remotely lo-fi about the overall sound. It’s a testament to remarkable advances in remote recording. “Even the video for You Lucky One was recorded on my phone and I put it together on my laptop,” he says.

He says he can be obsessive about capturing the exact sound that’s in his head. Often, of course, that’s not possible and after tinkering with a song for months, he sometimes reverts to an earlier, freer version. “I don’t know if I’ve got any better at time management when it comes to recording albums,” he says, “but I do like it when my manager cracks the whip, when deadlines are imposed.

“There’s always a point, maybe a year and a half in, where there are phone calls going, ‘So…’, and that focuses my mind.”

‘That Golden Time’ is released on May 10. Villagers will play an outdoor show as part of Trinity Summer Series, Trinity College Dublin, on June 29