Conor O’Brien’s third album ‘Where Have You Been All My Life?’ – under the guise of Villagers – is a more pared-back, intimate journey compared to the multi-faceted arrangements of ‘Becoming A Jackal’ (2010) and ‘{Awayland}’ (2013).

This fresh approach was extended on subsequent Villagers tours, where old songs were reinvented to match the new. Then for one day in July 2015, 18 songs were quickly captured and 12 songs chosen for the final album, making it Villagers’ most intense, but satisfying, session to date.

These recordings are all first or second takes, and the immediacy of the occasion was part of the magic that day, live and unadorned by overdubs or studio trickery. ‘Where Have You Been All My Life?’ was recorded in one day at London’s RAK Studio with Richard Woodcraft (Radiohead, The Last Shadow Puppets) and Villagers live engineer Ber Quinn.

The album is a re-imagining of older material seamlessly woven with present glories from Villagers’ most recent studio album, ‘Darling Arithmetic;’ a collection of songs that distils five years and three albums of Villagers’ songwriting into one flowing narrative.