The Records That Made Me: Villagers

With The Records That Made Me, VF uncovers the vinyl releases that have influenced and shaped our favourite musicians, DJs and artists.

Villagers, the musical project of Irish indie-folk singer Conor O’Brien, has been winning hearts with thoughtful, poetic troubadourism since 2010’s excellent debut Becoming A Jackal. Now, marking a decade since the release of 2015’s poignant Darling Arithmetic, O’Brien celebrates with a set of anniversary shows and a special 10th-anniversary vinyl repressing. Speaking to VF, he reflects on the music that shaped his early influences and his relationship with vinyl.

Despite being surrounded by vinyl as a child, his home’s lack of a record player meant that, for O’Brien, “vinyl was just little pieces of artwork that [he] would see in the corner of a cupboard that would never be opened.” This changed when O’Brien began collecting in earnest during his college days. “I got a cheap little record player, so that was really when I started getting into that format,” he says. “Now, I can’t actually move in my apartment because there’s too many.”

For O’Brien, Villagers’ vinyl output fits perfectly with how holistically he’s connected to every aspect of his art—both musically and visually. “I was always very involved in the visual aspect of how my music is presented, so when I was making that first album, I was thinking about it in vinyl form even as I was writing the songs,” O’Brien explains.

“I had little sketchbooks, and I was imagining what it would look like as a record. In a weird way, that informed some of the development of the music because I was seeing it as an artefact—something that someone could have in their hands, put on, and listen to. It’s very intertwined for me, so the physicality is a big part of it.”

Looking back on a decade of Darling Arithmetic, O’Brien recalls the records that influenced his writing process, including Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, and Bob Dylan. “It was all more stripped-down music, and I was focusing on whether a song could hold itself up without too much adornment.”

Read on to discover the records that made Villagers.

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Faith No More

Angel Dust

(Slash)

People always laugh at me when I tell them I was a huge Faith No More fan but I was so obsessed. I could have picked a couple of records by them, but I guess I would have been 11 when I heard Angel Dust and it was just that moment when music was beginning to become everything to me.

Angel Dust was lying around my house. I think my older brother had bought it and I used to put it on my headphones and just as soon as it was finished, I would just start playing it again. I was so obsessed with this because it just had everything for me. They had that sardonic sarcastic take on modern capitalist American culture. As a teenager, when you’re starting to think into your nihilism and your dreams of anarchism and all this kind of stuff, it was great.

It’s a crazy record, but it has these beautiful symphonic musical ideas which is completely bizarre because it’s at odds with the rough edges. It blew my mind. I just really, really love it.

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Beck

Mellow Gold

(BMG)

Mellow Gold was the first cassette I bought and I would just listen to it over and over and over and over again. It’s a perfect record for me. It sounded more accessible, I guess. It was the first time I heard music which sounded like it was made by someone that I knew because it was just really lo-fi. A lot of it sounds like a bedroom recording which was exciting to hear when you’re that age and you’re starting to record yourself.

It was just playful and creative and had lots of bad language, which I liked at the time. Just not too serious, I guess. It was just a really great record. I actually got to do a show with Beck years and years later. It was his Song Reader album. There were a bunch of musicians on there and I was one of the musicians who was singing one of the songs. I got to show him the chords to one of his own songs because he forgot a few of them and that was a big moment for my 12-year-old self.

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Bjork

Homogenic

(Mother Records)

Björk’s Homogenic is still one of the best albums ever made. Perhaps, that’s a big claim, but it holds such a deep place in my heart. I think it’s just amazing.

It’s so inventive. I’m staring at the vinyl of it right now in front of me in my apartment and was listening to it quite recently. Weirdly, it’s got that thing which I mentioned earlier with the Faith No More album, where it mixes these quite complicated orchestral ideas with a much rawer kind of take on pop music, but this time it’s very raw electronic music.

It’s a very timeless production. I don’t think it’s aged at all. I think it sounds better than a lot of stuff coming out now, in terms of even techno. There’s a track on it called “Pluto”, which is pretty full-on aggressive techno, and she’s screaming into some sort of distortion and, to me, it sounds like the music of the future, when it was actually made in like 1997.

She’s an anomaly and there are so many records since that I’ve been obsessed with, but this one was when I was 14 or 15 and it was just my album for two years. I couldn’t stop listening to it.

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Mos Def

Black On Both Sides

(Rawkus Records)

Up until this, in terms of hip-hop,  I was only really into Public Enemy for years and was listening to Yo! Bum Rush the Show, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and all that stuff but Mos Def was the first time I’d heard music like this. I remember MTV was on and it was pretty late at night when “UMI Says” came on the TV, and my ears perked up. I just thought, “What the hell is this?”. It sounded so deep and spiritual. It had this spirituality to it and that runs throughout this record.

He does this lovely thing where he interweaves the socio-political with more metaphysical stuff and gets deeper. At the time, that blew my mind because I was starting to get into writing lyrics. It made me realise you can use words to cross boundaries which you’ve kind of made in your mind about certain things. You can just break down those boundaries within a second if you choose the right words – that’s what this record showed me.

It also samples so much cool stuff. This was when the internet was still very new but I remember trying to find out what the samples were. There was Aretha Franklin, Fela Kuti and David Axelrod and all that library music type stuff. It was just so stimulating and I couldn’t get over it.

I was actually in New Orleans a couple of years ago with a friend of mine and we went to see the Hot 8 Brass Band and randomly, he just, he just Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) just turned up at the show. I think we freaked him out a little bit by how much we were fanboying over him but it was pretty exciting.

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Radiohead

Kid A

(Capitol Records)

Kid A, Jesus Christ. I mean, what can I say that hasn’t already been said? I almost didn’t want to add it here because it’s just so obviously one of the best records musically ever but it’s just one of the records that was a real linchpin in my musical development.

The first band I ever saw live was Radiohead and they were playing OK Computer and that blew my mind. It was really quite a pivotal moment, but then when they released Kid A I have a very strong memory of listening to it on the way to school. At the time, I remember holding a copy of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and I’d just finished reading 1984 by Orwell and all this kind of stuff, so it was all dystopian and that stuff that I was getting into at the time.

I was about to leave school and go to college and this album just completely soundtracked that. I have very specific memories of hearing each individual track on the album and just thinking, “Wow, they’re creating whole universes within each song” you know?

Within four minutes, there’s a different universe on every single song, and that just blew my mind. It’s just the sheer creativity of it. It was pretty amazing. I used to fall asleep a lot in school so I was just waiting until I could get this back in my ears again.

Villagers perform 10th anniversary Darling Arithmetic shows in Paris, London and Dublin this May. 

Read more of The Records That Made Me series here.