Last month, Radiohead’s guitarist Ed O’Brien called to talk about his debut solo record, Earth, but like everyone else in the world, he had other things on his mind. I asked how he was. “I’ve been better,” he said. “I’ve definitely got the virus.” Though he technically couldn’t know that for sure—he hadn’t gotten a test, he said, thinking the short supply was better used on someone more vulnerable than a member of Radiohead—he had been holed up in self-isolation in Wales with flu-like symptoms for just over a week.

Without missing a beat, though, O’Brien rebounded optimistically. “Hopefully I’ll have built up some kind of immunity to it and once I’m better I can go out and be a helpful citizen to the local community, maybe do deliveries and stuff like that. Because if you get it first, you’re in the initial wave and then you can then get back out and help.” He noted there’s a silver lining to any crisis like this, because “that human spirit of compassion, empathy, and kindness comes to the fore.”

A month later, O’Brien has fully recovered from whatever had been ailing him, just in time for the release of Earth, out tomorrow. Even though Earth has been in the oven for several years, it feels especially suited for our present moment: the spirit of optimism from our conversation runs through the record in many ways. For starters, O’Brien is plowing ahead with putting it out at a time when many artists are pushing their release dates to a (hopefully) more receptive music-consuming market many months down the line. More importantly, Earth is warm and open; it’s a summer-weather record coming out at a time when we’re stuck indoors. Where Radiohead often pulls you to dark and esoteric corners of our modern dystopia, Earth takes you by the hand and brings you outside into the sun.

A lot of that has to do with where O’Brien started working on the album. At the end of 2012, he fulfilled a lifelong dream: he stepped away from his band, picked up his family, and moved to a remote village in Brazil. “I realized I had all these incredible adventures with Radiohead, but what I wanted to do was have a proper full-on adventure with my wife and kids,” he says. The transformative experience became ground zero for Earth, which he wrote and recorded over the next six years (with a break built in for Radiohead’s 2016 album, A Moon Shaped Pool).

These self-isolating days, the thought of abruptly moving to a different country seems impossible, even for rock stars. So we asked O’Brien to reflect on what he learned when he uprooted his life and moved halfway around the world, and how that experience shaped his new album.

Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve

Why Brazil?

We had a deep love of all things South America, and we'd been to Brazil a lot. It felt really important to go to a culture like Brazil. I love Britain, and it is my home, but it’s quite an emotionally restrained place. I definitely wanted to go to a culture that was open-hearted, that was warm, that wears its heart on its sleeve, that is affectionate, because that makes me happy.

Did that culture rub off on you?

Definitely. I say things now rather than keep them in. If I love something and I appreciate it, I'll say it, and I wear my heart on my sleeve. In a way, what's good about it is I'm able to access my truth. My truth comes out. Whereas, sometimes Britain is the land of passive aggression. People don't say what they think. It also helped me, too, creatively, because creativity is about your truth. By going somewhere like Brazil, it really helped me to not be ashamed of my truth.