Villagers Credit 'Discipline' for Songwriting Success

It didn't take Conor O'Brien long to start a new project after his band the Immediate broke up in 2007. It was only a matter of hours before the Dublin musician began writing songs for Villagers, essentially a solo recording project that often turns into a full band in concert.

"The day we broke up, I got very drunk that night and woke up with a massive hangover and wrote my first song, literally at 7AM the next morning," O'Brien tells Spinner of the origins of Villagers' first album, 'Becoming a Jackal.' That song, 'Transitional Confessional,' was the B-side on Villagers' first single, 'On a Sunlit Stage.'

O'Brien subsequently spent nearly two years on tour playing with Irish singer Cathy Davey, focusing on his own material during brief periods off the road when his shaky finances made it easier to stay at home and write.

"If I had a week off, I'd stay indoors because I didn't really have any money to go out," he says. "I just kind of locked myself away and wrote and recorded. Every now and then I'd have a month off, and I'd get a bunch of stuff done."

It helped that O'Brien tried to keep regular hours, working on his literate, catchy folk-pop songs as if they were part of a full-time job.

"It's tough to get a rhythm or a routine, but I think I had moments of routine," he says. "If I had a couple weeks off, I sort of treated it like a 9 to 5 and made myself write, which I think is probably as important as the inspiration part. The discipline part is usually the overlooked part of writing or creating in general."

'Becoming a Jackal' is out now on Domino.