Ed O'Brien on Gaza, his new solo album and the future of Radiohead

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Set us as preferred Ed O’Brien of Radiohead is strolling down the beach in Santa Monica on a recent afternoon as he reminisces about his first trip to Los Angeles.“I came here in ’87 on a Greyhound,” the guitarist says.“I 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 — like, ‘Where is everything?’ So I got on another bus and ended up in Huntington Beach for a week.” He laughs.“Next time I came was with the band in ’93 — got picked up at LAX in a limo.”Three decades later, O’Brien is in town by himself again to spread the word about his new solo album, “Blue Morpho.” Spawned from a mid-pandemic struggle with depression, it’s a lush and slightly spooky psychedelic-folk excursion that O’Brien made with help from the producer Paul Epworth, the jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings and Radiohead’s drummer, Philip Selway.

(Epworth, a Grammy and Oscar winner thanks to his work with Adele, was familiar to O’Brien as a fellow dad from his kids’ school.)Last month, O’Brien, who’s 58, released a short film to accompany the LP that shows him wandering the woods near his home in Wales; in October, he’ll head out on a European tour behind “Blue Morpho,” which follows his 2020 solo debut, “Earth.” Dressed in dark trousers and a denim jacket, he discussed his life and music on the beach walk and over tea on the patio at the Viceroy hotel.In Pitchfork’s review of “Blue Morpho,” the writer described you as Radiohead’s “most politically engaged yet most reclusive member.” Fair or unfair?I don’t know whether I’m the most politically engaged, but I definitely have my beliefs.I studied politics and economics at university, so it’s hard not to have view...