Best of What's Next: Villagers

Photos by Rich Gilligan

Villagers was born out of a truly awful hangover. After a night of heavy drinking, Conor O'Brien woke up early and, too dehydrated to fall back asleep, started scribbling lyrics to take his mind off his self-inflicted suffering. Two years later, those songs have been re-drafted and re-arranged, but their pain remains intact on Becoming a Jackal, Villagers' debut LP (out now). On the record, O'Brien lurks in lyrical shadows shrouded by intricate orchestration and spooky folk-rock hollows, singing with the earnestness of a wise—or at least weary—young traveler finally ready to tell his tale.

He's just 27, but it's already quite a story: In 2007, he was a member of Dublin-based band The Immediate, who were mostly unknown in the U.S. but were verging on the big-time in Ireland. Their record In Towers and Clouds won a Choice Music Prize (for the year's best Irish album), and they were amassing growing fanbase and gobs of critical praise (one writer even proclaimed their debut to be the best first album by an Irish act since U2's Boy). And then, as these things tend to go, the band broke up. It took a while for O'Brien to find his feet as a solo artist, but Jackal befits its bleary origins—it's a collection of bitingly honest folk and swirling chamber pop that owes much to Conor Oberst as it does to Sufjan Sevens. O'Brien recently called Paste from Dublin to talk about chilling out, scavenging and gelling.

Paste: You found some success as part of The Immediate before the band broke up. What did that experience teach you about what to do and not to do in a band setting?
Conor O’Brien: With The Immediate, it was the first time I was in a band. I took everything really seriously. I was very uptight all the time if anything wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. Since then I’ve chilled out. I just enjoy the shows. Every show is different, and every one is just as important as the last one.

Paste: After you began writing new songs, post-Immediate, did you have any idea what to do with them?
O’Brien: I didn't have a plan for them. About a week after the band broke up, my friend Kathy [Davey], who—I’d been recording guitar and drums on her album—she asked me to go on tour with her. I did—I ended up being her touring guitarist for two years. Any time I had free time, I’d be writing. But I had no idea if it was going to be a band or a solo thing, or even if I was going to perform. I was mainly doing it for my own sanity.

Paste: You eventually formed a band to play those songs live.
O’Brien: Yes, we did our first show in October 2008, and we were opening for a local band. The second show was opening for Cass McCombs on Domino, and one of the guys from Domino was at that. He came to a few more shows. It was quite fast after that—right away from the second show, which was kind of weird. But the songs had had time to grow well before that.

Paste: Villagers started as just you, but does it feel like a full band now?
O’Brien: It does when we’re on tour. When we’re not on tour, everyone goes off and does his own thing. Two or three songs into a tour, the band begins progressing again and gelling, which is the most exciting part for me. To me, that’s the test of a good band—if they can loosen up with the songs. Incorporate subtle emotional changes, arrangement changes.

Paste: The title Becoming a Jackal hints to changing into something evil or dangerous. Have you seen yourself do that?
O’Brien: Yeah. Have you? It’s about growth and change, and it focuses on the scavenging aspect of human kind. The rest of the album sees humans in a more animalistic way. It dresses down these ideas, these lofty ideas of the soul and spirituality, and makes them no different than animals. I focus on the pure physicality. A lot of the stuff is written really subconsciously. A lot of those songs are written at like three or four in the morning, and I’ll just have these images. They’re quite visual songs, dreamscapes. It’s always a joyful, playful experience, like being a child making a painting. Even the tortured songs, I was really happy making them. I was really letting something out.

Paste: So these songs are like purging for you. In “The Meaning of Ritual,” you sing “My love is selfish, and it cares not who it hurts.” Did that line come from a particular situation?
O’Brien: I wanted a love song that dressed down love. To put it alongside all the other human emotions, even things like hunger for food, so that it’s not being put on a pedestal. I remember thinking I want to write these words so that people will hear them, and I want to be singing them live. I want them to get it. It’s a communal folk song. I hope it can ring bells with anyone. Sometimes when you delve these dark places it can go the opposite direction. When people talk about depressing music, to me it’s the music I like the most. The only music that’s depressing to me is superficial music. Music is there to put things you wouldn’t usually say to people out there. Songs make you think. Everyone’s got their own universe spinning around inside their head, and very rarely do we communicate it. Songs have a social function in that way—they communicate.

Paste: Love is one of, if not the most, covered topic in pop music. Do you think that it’s often tackled in a superficial way?
O’Brien: Yeah, it’s a selling point. People use it to make money. I guess it’s one of those weird conundrums. Something that could be among the most beautiful in the world is turned into such cynical thing, the way it can be used in the entertainment industry.

Paste: Will the upcoming tour be your first time in America?
O’Brien: No, I did solo stuff in SXSW this year. I was worried because I didn't bring the band over. SXSW is quite loud and crazy. But it turned out well—people listened. We had to close a few windows for some of the gigs, or you could hear a hundred bands over my whispering. I had one terrible show. It was a St. Patrick’s Day party, which seems bigger in the US than it is in Ireland. Everyone was just drinking. I don't think one person was looking at the stage. So I did a Beatles cover and left.