Interview: Villagers on the "exciting and joyous" side of songwriting

"That's a really tough answer to question. Answer to question? Actually it's just like that, 'answer to question, how can you answer a...' and so the song begins!

Ragged Words has just asked Conor O'Brien the 'how do they do that question'. In the Dubliner's case, we're wondering how the songs on Becoming A Jackal - his "predictably remarkable" debut under the guise of Villagers - came to be. The same thing never works twice, O'Brien says. The process is automatic and subconscious, he adds. Take the album's title track for instance. It started as a drawing - the sketch that would later became the album's cover in fact - but the image begged for words and music and was rewarded with the most seamless of three minute pop songs. The album's chilling opener 'I Saw The Dead', meanwhile, always had that "Philip Glassy piano thing" but the lyrics weren't working until O'Brien, for no reason he can remember, began to sing the words from another song along to it.

"When I started singing the song, I started singing those words and each word suggested the next word and each sentence the next sentence and by the end of it, it kind of felt like it had written itself," O'Brien explains. "It's this bizarre thing. You can be toying with something for three days and nothing will come out at all and then suddenly its written itself and that's the only time I'm happy with a song, when something exterior to you has played a part. Even though you're probably lying to yourself by saying that, if it feels that way, it's usually a song which is worthy of other people's attention. Cos I write a lot of shit aswell which I'll never play to anyone...

"To me it's just a playful childish experience and no matter how maybe terrifying some of the places it takes you are, or the imagery - it can take you places that perhaps you don't want to go, but it's always exciting and joyous I guess. The whole experience.

If his songwriting remains a childish exercise, then O'Brien certainly hasn't lost any of his wide-eyedness. Literally. Just like fellow detail-obsessed Irish songwriter Adrian Crowley, you can't help but notice upon meeting the Dun Laoghaire man that he too has a pair of eyes that completely dominate his face. They light up at particular moments too, like when he's talking about the "exciting and joyous" experience of finishing a song or about the brilliant and brief time - for us listeners at least - his first band of schoolmates The Immediate enjoyed. On his own though, O'Brien has far eclipsed his previous, mainly domestically heralded, successes. Becoming A Jackal topped the Irish albums charts after its first on the shelves, garnered more 4-star reviews in the UK than a lot of bands manage in an entire career and ahead of next week's US release, Villagers has been upgraded to 'buzz band' status. The hive of excitement, however, had humble beginnings. In the the remote, north western Irish hills of Donegal to be precise.

That's where O'Brien, freshly-inked deal with Domino Records in hand, decamped with co-producer Tommy McLaughlin during that particularly severe blizzard of December last year. He also went north with a set of demos that sounded very close to the finished product. Quite astoundingly, that means all those complex arrangements that are littered throughout Becoming A Jackal were basically written by O'Brien, alone in his bedroom. The time spent in Donegal allowed both to let their geeky sides go wild and concentrate on getting every sound right, something that makes Ragged Words think back to O'Brien submission a month earlier to our artist albums of the decade poll when he wasn't alone in drooling over the "unwelcoming masterpiece" of Portishead's Third.

"Dummy was a massive album for me when I was growing up," O'Brien says when we bring up the Bristol masters. "I remember hearing it and being like 'woooow'. I was really into Pink Floyd when I was younger and I heard Dummy and I remember thinking those drum sounds sound like the drum sounds on pop songs on the radio but it's just as cool as a rock band. Not that they were a rock band but it was the first time I heard an electronic drum sound that I actually liked and that wasn't pure superficial pop or whatever. And then when Third came out... If you ever listen to it on headphones, it's the most claustrophobic thing you'll ever hear. Her voice is beautiful. Even that Rustin Man record was really beautiful too.

Does Villagers have a similar obsession then when it comes to making the most out of every single sound?

"Yes, I'd say so. For the month that we were recording, it was very much a one track mind - do the album, get the songs down. I think just from listing to Portishead or Massive Attack - I remember being really into the trip hop thing in general, stuff that is very production based. That was a big influence on me, the layering and just the attention to detail on the sounds. To talk about it can get a bit geeky and boring but we are geeks - me and Tommy. He's just a more studious geek than I am."

McLaughlin also acts as Villagers live guitarist - not to mention part time tour manager - and makes up a backing band that are O'Brien's secret weapon. While much of the recent focus from afar has fixated on the fact that the diminutive Dubliner alone plays everything on record, most outside Ireland have yet to be floored by the full-on Villagers live experience. O'Brien acknowledges how lucky he is and trusts his bandmates implicitly to take the music over themselves and make the live shows far more of a creative process. Hearing aspects of the arrangements bubbling around you in different ways and subtly changing on certain nights, is something you can last on that for months, he says. Yet when Ragged Words last spoke to O'Brien in January last year -- when Villagers topped our tips for that year -- he confessed to being terrified of bands since The Immediate's demise. Is that still the case?

"I'd never say never but I can't envisage recording with musicians. Certainly not right now, maybe I will in the future but if I was to do another album tomorrow, I'd be sitting down again to play all the instruments. I don't know why, I just like having all the control at the beginning. I don't mind letting it out at the end but to collaborate with someone would feel like a lie. Even though I'm really close to these guys musically, I grew up with The Immediate and we grew up listening to music for the first time together and went to school together so it was very natural writing together. To me that's over and I have to do it all myself. There's no other option."

When The Immediate's time was suddenly called, Dublin went into deep mourning. Villagers has more than just awoken those left reeling, it's given O'Brien a more natural home and the chance to go where The Immediate may well have. Does he see it, initially at least, then as a case of unfinished business.  

"I wouldn't even put them in competition with each other. That band had a natural life span and I think it was hugely successful and beautiful," O'Brien says, allowing a brief, broad smile to cross his face as some particular beautiful memory crosses his mind. He's like the character "cheering from the sidelines with a sandwich and a beer" on Villagers' Set The Tigers Free.

"This has its own natural life span which is probably my physical life span." At just 26 years-of-age, a fascinating journey lies ahead.