<\/p>\n
Ed O\u2019Brien of Radiohead is strolling down the beach in Santa Monica on a recent afternoon as he reminisces about his first trip to Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came here in \u201987 on a Greyhound,\u201d the guitarist says. \u201cI was traveling around America between high school and college, and I remember arriving in downtown L.A. from San Francisco at 6 in the morning. Downtown was sort of hollowed out \u2014 like, \u2018Where is everything?\u2019 So I got on another bus and ended up in Huntington Beach for a week.\u201d He laughs.<\/p>\n
\u201cNext time I came was with the band in \u201993 \u2014 got picked up at LAX in a limo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three decades later, O\u2019Brien is in town by himself again to spread the word about his new solo album, \u201cBlue Morpho.\u201d Spawned from a mid-pandemic struggle with depression, it\u2019s a lush and slightly spooky psychedelic-folk excursion that O\u2019Brien made with help from the producer Paul Epworth, the jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings and Radiohead\u2019s drummer, Philip Selway. (Epworth, a Grammy and Oscar winner thanks to his work with Adele, was familiar to O\u2019Brien as a fellow dad from his kids\u2019 school.)<\/p>\n