Villagers' Conor O'Brien Finds Going It Alone an 'Intense Experience'

Playing most of the instruments on Villagers' debut LP, 'Becoming a Jackal,' seemed like a matter of necessity, singer-songwriter Conor J. O'Brien tells Spinner. Villagers, essentially a solo vehicle for O'Brien's soulful, sometimes unsettling folk-tinged pop songs, became his refuge after the breakup of his previous band, the Immediate, which disintegrated shortly after releasing its debut LP in 2006.

"We were really good friends from school. We knew each other since we were young," O'Brien says. "We had a really good time together in the band, and it just happened that the worst time in the band coincided with the most success we had."

Although he remains friends with his former bandmates, the idea of such close collaboration with other musicians as part of a new band didn't feel right to O'Brien.

"I definitely knew completely instinctively that I would never, ever want to work with anyone else creatively to that degree, in terms of actually writing songs from scratch with other people," he says. "It would have felt like a weird lie or something. It was just so natural with Dave [Hedderman] and the Immediate, because we had been doing it since we were so young. We had been writing together since we were 12."

Although stepping out on his own was discomfiting to start, O'Brien soon discovered the benefits of working by himself.

"Just writing a huge batch of songs like that was an intense experience, and it took me a while to get used to the fact that there was no one else to bounce ideas off. But after I got used to that, it was quite liberating," he says. "It makes things so open. You can do whatever you want when you're making things on your own, there's no boundaries. That's where these songs came from, that sense of freedom."