Villagers - That Golden Time (track by track)
Conor O'Brien talks through all 10 tracks on Villagers' seventh studio album, That Golden Time
Conor O’Brien was on TPOE 311 talking through all 10 tracks that make up Villagers’ seventh studio album, That Golden Time, which came out on Domino on May 10. You can listen to the full episode here, and read an edited version of the chat below. If you like the post, I’d love if you subscribed to the TPOE podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever app you use. And maybe subscribe to the Substack and share it. All links here.
Truly Alone
I guess there's a lot of transactional stuff going on these days. And there's a lot of malevolent forces, which are driven by the way we consume information. I was reading, with the risk of sounding extremely pretentious. I was reading lots of Nietzsche, and also lots of his precursor, Arthur Schopenhauer, who Nietzsche would have read and disagreed with and agreed with and stuff. 19th century German philosophy. I was just amazed about how prescient it felt in relation to the internet age and what we're going through now, and really what I was getting out of it for this song, 'Truly Alone', was that lovely word that Nietzsche uses, which is not to glean, not to glean to things, so not to attach yourself too strongly to any opinion you might have. Opinions are great and identities are great and all these things are really interesting and very fruitful but I think if a society attaches itself so much to these things, it becomes quite tribalistic. And it becomes quite, I guess, less friendly. So, I thought with 'Truly Alone', it would be interesting to read a song from the perspective of somebody who is a victim of one such society.
Do you see this album as a response to the last one? It sounds creatively like it might have been? The last one was really session focused, you said that you did three or four sessions with this group of musicians, whereas this one was written in your apartment. It’s mostly you and then you invited a couple of people in. So in that respect, whether thematically it's in reaction to the last album, creatively it was?
Yeah, I think so. I don't know if I was thinking about it being a reaction. There's no point in trying to repeat yourself... Once I've done something I just get bored. There's a totally different energy, - even the way that we're playing songs now. I've just done 10 days of rehearsals with the guys in the band and we're gearing up to tour and even the way we're playing the songs is drastically different. Because with Fever Dreams, it was about presenting this big show. So I was using laptops to fill out the band with orchestra and stuff. We've completely disconnected from all that for this upcoming tour. Everything you're hearing is human beings making noises. There's no metronomes or clicks or tracks or any of that stuff. it's much more changeable. Every time we've rehearsed these songs, they've changed. So they're already kind of morphing, which is quite exciting.
You don't have to name any any songs or any cycles in particular, but did you find in the past that you're repeating yourself? Were there moments recording music where you were like, I've done this before?
All the time, yeah. I mean, most of the time with albums for me, what you're hearing, as the listener, is 10% of the work I've done, because I throw away 90%. I don't throw it away, but I put it aside. And then in a few years time, it might become the beginnings of something else. That's kind of how I work. Yeah, it's always really uncomfortable. And it's always lots of failure.
Do you enjoy that process, that failing?
I don't enjoy it, but I'm kind of addicted to it. I enjoy periods of it, when I've finally succeeded in something that was tearing me up inside. I always stop myself from getting too dramatic about this, because it sounds like when I hear myself back, I always go, 'Oh gosh, you're such an idiot'. As if it's the biggest problem in the world I have. But my own personal psychology is one of I get very deeply obsessed with my projects. So there are periods of the whole process when I'm not very good to talk to as a person. I'm just quite narrow-minded about this one project, I think, so it is quite tormenting sometimes to squeeze these little album turds out.
First Responder
It starts out with just piano, guitar, and your voice and then it swells. You've got an orchestra on there. Tell me about getting an orchestra or players from an orchestra.
Actually, that orchestra you speak of is Peter Broderick. He played lots and lots of takes of the same violin. Oh actually, there might be some other players, there might be a bit of viola there as well. A woman called Anne Marie McGahan, but yeah, mainly Pete Broderick on violin. And Donal Lunney on bazouki. Which was just magic. Those two players on that particular track - we were really feeling it out in those sessions, more so than perhaps some of the other ones with some of the more orchestral players. With those ones, it was just musicians going, 'Let's just try something now!' And then we'd just feel takes out, with Peter and Donal. With Donal, it was literally the first two takes that he did. That's what you hear on the album. And then we just went for food. It was just crazy. I mean, all those years of playing, I guess, but it was, yeah, it was amazing.
I Want What I Don’t Need
The line I've picked out is "I'll wed myself to my beliefs, and they'll harden like my arteries. And I'll take myself so seriously." How do you come to make art out of these kinds of arguments online? Like why is it something that you want to kind of investigate or examine?
I don't want to. I actually don't. I'm compelled in my music. 'I'm compelled; I'm taking myself so seriously now. I just make music and I use music to discover what's going on inside my subconscious. And this particular song was, well, there's a lot going on in it. I was reading an essay called 'On the Freedom of the Will' by the aformentioned Arthur Schopenhauer. He likened this idea of free will, that humans have free will, he said, It was as if to say - I'm paraphrasing here - but he said it was like saying, 'the ripples in a river have chosen to move towards the ocean'. And he's almost laughing at this sense, this idea that we have free will. I was thinking a lot about that argument, because it's kind of like that philosophical question as to whether we actually do have free will as human beings. It's a circular thing, almost. Because if you argue that we don't, you can almost say, Well, that's an argument that we do because if you make a choice to do something, well, the people who argue against it can say that choice was already written in stone and blah, blah, blah, it just keeps going on and on and on. And I was just thinking about that. And having fun with it with words, really.
You Lucky One
This features the aforementione Donal Lunny. He's become a bit of a musical foil for you over the past few years?
I would have gotten to know him over the years at the Young Hearts nights, the charity shows, and the Yules, the Christmas shows for the Simon Community. And he does pretty much almost all of them. He does them all the time, and it's amazing. But I think I really got to know him through the Céiliúradh, which was in the Royal Albert Hall about 10 years ago now. And that was when Michael D - the first time an Irish head of state went to visit the queen. He was the musical director. And he put me at ease so much, because I was so nervous because I was still a bit, I guess, wet behind the ears. And I knew I was going to be singing one of my favorite songs with one of my favorite singers, 'Shipbuilding' with Elvis Costello, and he hadn't arrived in the room yet. And there was almost an orchestra of people staring at me and asking me what the chords to my songs were and I was just like 'oh I don't know'. I was being a bit of a wuss that day and Donal, I felt like he was kind of my musical father figure. And he was like, 'It's OK, relax, just show me the chords' and then he translated them to all the people when my brain wasn't working, and he was just this lovely, peaceful, steady figure. And over the years, when I've played with him, it just feels so natural. I love rhythmically joining in with him, even though I'm not really from that world. He's really taught me a little bit and yeah, it's great. Really nice to know him.
That Golden Time
The title track of the album, you say it's a song about dreaming of another time and another place. Is it a nostalgic album, do you think? It sounds nostalgic…
Yeah, I’m old now… I guess it's kind of nostalgic. It's maybe an aspirational song, as well. There's a feeling that perhaps the time and place that the protagonist is dreaming of never existed, and it's more of a hope, an idealism. It's kind of about, I guess, realising that you've kind of sleepwalked into compromising quite a lot over the years and sort of waking yourself up from that, seeing through the bullshit a little bit. But it's also I suppose, it's about intellectual humility as well, because the verses kind of lay it all out. And then the choruses just go, 'Well, who am I to say', that's a repeated sentence, 'who am I to say, Who am I to say?'. So it's about not clinging too much to the idea that you have you have the key and the answer to everything.
Keepsake
You repeat at the end, ‘Can I keep the dream alive?’ Do you find it harder, making music as a career?
I still have moments of ecstasy when I'm playing music. Like in these rehearsals, when we really finally got somewhere with the songs, I had one day where I felt like I was floating all day long. And for me, just personally, that's what I'm always trying to hit, but it takes a lot of the opposite of that as well. You have to put in all the groundwork for it all.
It doesn't happen too often, I guess, when you're going through the tour motions?
Yeah, it has done. I mean it didn't when I was - I hit the self-destruct button a bit too much in the last few years.
Doing too many shows?
No just drinking too much wine and not really being able to go on stage without half a bottle of wine in ya. That was kind of making it lose something, I think
As in you couldn't go on stage without it?
I didn't even test that hypothesis. I never got to test that because I was just doing it every night and then continuing to drink after the shows so that kind of ruined a little bit of the - I mean there's lots of stuff I'd say I would have beautiful memories of right now if I didn't do that... It wasn't an extremely dangerous - like it wasn't high-level dependency but it was definitely dependency and I was numbing myself in order to do the job. So I've finally gotten rid of that which is good.
Brother Hen
It's kind of like waking up to the bullshit. We just live in this world of so much bullshit. And insanity. There's one line in it, which is 'just another bird in a half-lit world'. And I think I was using 'half lit' as in half drunk and I think we are living in a half drunk world at the moment. I think everyone's kind of mistaking the cosmetic for the eternal. I think the internet age hasn't just changed the way that we interact but it's changed the way we actually dream. You know, it's changed the way we actually imagine. And imagination and art and connection through those things is a sacred thing. I think we're kind of living through a slightly unenlightened age, which is half drunk on its own self.
No Drama
It's, ironically, the most dramatic song on the record. I'd say even melodramatic, probably, but without the mellow. I was rereading that Shakespeare play As You Like It. It has that line 'All the world's a stage. 'I was coming at it from that perspective; seeing the world as like a set of actors - seeing the people around you as actors and seeing the ground on which they stand as the stage and you are the audience member. But then you actually get onto the stage and you go behind the curtain and see all the workings and all the strange power relationships and all the cogs which make it move. So yeah, it's a funny one, that one, I really enjoyed making it.
Behind That Curtain
I remember spending about four hours trying to pretend I could play piano and finding all the chords, all these little weird jazz chords and not really understanding why they worked together but just really closing my eyes and really trying to feel them out. It's quite an epic tune for me. It's almost kind of the centrepiece of the album, even though it's just towards the end. It feels again a little bit drunk. It feels like it's swaying slightly, maybe a slightly Tom Waitsy thing - I was listening to lots of Tom Waits at the time actually. It ends with a crazy clarinet solo, which was a lot of fun. Before it was a clarinet solo, it was actually a sample of my dad talking about visiting his grandparents, seeing how his grandparents would have lived in extreme poverty in Dublin. There would have been one toilet to about six families and stuff. And he was just telling me about being a kid and seeing that. And I was putting it in the context of the sort of suburban middle class Dublin that I grew up in with the Celtic Tiger and all that stuff being the norm for me. And I was interested in I guess, going behind the curtain of that and that being part of that song and contextualizing where you where you come from. Because I was reading the Fintan O'Toole book at the time, which is amazing.
Why did you take the sample off the song? It just didn't work?
It didn't work. It kind of worked for me, I think it was more like, I felt like it would have been a skipper, you would have skipped it, because it was quite long, and slow, and the song already is quite long and slow. And I just thought it's not doing the job I wanted it to do, so I got Brandon Jenkinson over and we just we just ripped the clarinet solos out.
Money on the Mind
The press release says that this is a moment of serenity with a ray of hope. Is that how you see the song?
Yeah, well, it flips. All throughout it's saying that the character in the song has money on the mind as if he's obsessed with money. But by the end, it flips it and said, 'My money is on the mind', as in, I'm betting on the mind, I'm betting on the human intellect to rip us out of this age that we're living in. So in that way, it's definitely a hopeful song. It's also talks about a sense of injury. It says, 'I was trying to be someone, anyone but me, clinging on so tight to a sense of injury.' And that's quite personal to me, because I feel like I did that. I think a lot of people do that. When they're younger, they get a sense of the way the world has wronged them. And then they cling to that. And I definitely did that quite a lot. Probably more than most people I knew. And I used it as an energy to write with. But it's no longer there. It doesn't even make sense to me anymore. Because I've seen a lot more of the world and I've seen where I lie in it. I was Marcus Aurelius and he says, 'Reject your sense of injury and injury itself will disappear.' Which I think is pretty cool. A cool way to live, although he did murder tens of thousands of Christians. So maybe we shouldn't listen to Marcus.