In the world of Alternative Rock, few bands have the name recognition of Snow Patrol. Attaining massive success over the last two decades, Snow Patrol has won a list of awards, earned a Grammy nomination in 2007 for the hit “Chasing Cars, and have sold multi-millions of albums.
Truly inspiring, even more so is their music; which has a distinctive, ethereal sound that mixes melodies, unforgettable vocal hooks, and highly personal lyrics. Remaining consistent, yet progressing, now in 2024 they return with their brand-new studio album The Forest Is The Path. Their first full-length album in six years, it seems that Lead Vocalist/Lyricist Gary Lightbody’s creative mind is flowing freely once more… so are you ready for the new music? Feeling liberated, Lightbody recently sat down to chat about the storied history of Snow Patrol, battling through writer’s block, plus much more.
Cryptic Rock – Snow Patrol has quite an extensive history at this point. Going back over a long time, the band has attained a lot of success through the years. A lot to talk about, how would you describe the journey of yourself with Snow Patrol over these three decades?
Gary Lightbody – Undulating. It’s definitely not been a straight line, been ups and downs and lefts and rights. However, it’s been a lot of fun, I’ll tell you that. It is a lot of fun still.
The first ten years were no success at all, but that didn’t mean that it was all brutal. We were also very young back then. It’s a lot easier to sleep in the back of the van or on top of the equipment, doing gigs to ten or two people every night at that age. It’s a lot easier to do that because you’re kind of made of elastic when you’re eighteen, twenty, twenty-five; a younger age.
I think it was probably a good thing for me, personally, having later success, taking ten years. I think if I had the level of success we had when it finally hit when I was eighteen, there’s no chance I would have been able to sustain it. My ego would have exploded. I’m very glad that it took a long time, and the ego had been pretty much beaten out of me by then. I was able to appreciate it a lot more and not take it for granted.
We’ve never taken it for granted. We still don’t. I still have quite a lot of imposter syndrome. I’m waiting for a tap on the shoulder, somebody’s saying, “You’re not supposed to be here,” any minute now still. I’m glad for that, because it does keep your feet on the ground. I don’t ever want to be somebody that expects anything, because music has given me so much. I don’t expect it. I’m always amazed by it, and I’m always surprised. Whatever twists, turns, undulations, and sometimes dead ends, it always teaches you something as well. It’s a gift, really.
Cryptic Rock – It certainly is. As you said, you don’t take it for granted. That humbleness that you project is a reflection of the hard work that the band put in through the years. You have not really just rested on success that you may have had fifteen years ago as well. You continue to progress with each record put out there.
Gary Lightbody – Thank you. I hope so, because we certainly intend to. We certainly put that level of work in, which is total, as far as I’m concerned. There’s no point in making an album unless you’re going to put your whole being into it. Blood, sweat, tears and anything else you got; you have to put it in there, or there’s not really any point in doing it. If there ever comes a point where we feel like we’re phoning it in, it’s like the alarm bells are going to ring pretty loud in our ears. We’re going to stop then, but it isn’t happening anytime soon.
Cryptic Rock – That is a good thing. You mentioned how you are forever grateful, in hindsight, that you did not have that success early on when you were still a kid. That is really interesting, because as we get older, we understand a lot more. When everything started to take off, was that surreal?
Gary Lightbody – Absolutely. Final Straw (2003), which would eventually sell nearly 5 million copies, at that point it had sold 10,000 copies, and had been out for six months. We thought we were going to get dropped in December of 2003. We did a gig for ten people in a place called High Wycombe in England, and five of those people were in the other band. That’s how our fortunes had not changed at all.
Then, there was a great, fantastic DJ, Jo Whiley; who if we ever build our own Mount Rushmore, her face will be on it. The album version of “Run” is six minutes long, which shows just how lack of forward thinking that I certainly have. Jo Whiley decided to play all six minutes of it on daytime radio here in the UK, and everything blew up.
We went from playing to 10 people in 2003, to February of 2004 where our next gig in London was to 3,000 people. By the summer, we were playing to 5,000 people. By the end of that year, we were playing in arenas and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. Even after ten years, I don’t think anybody’s ready for that to progress at that speed.
We were just always catching up with ourselves. That continued for the next nine years of albums and touring. We never really stopped to let our spiritual bodies catch up with our physical bodies. We were kind of spent at the end of that; which I think is probably why the last two albums have taken as long as they’ve taken between the two of them. It’s 13 or 15 years, whatever it is. That middle ten-year period of our careers was so intense, non-stop, and we never sat down. We were probably still trying to gather our lives together after that for a while.
Our lives are gathered now and we’re feeling good, strong, and we’re already ten songs into the next one. This one hasn’t even come out yet. We’re going back in to record with Fraser (T. Smith) again in November. That’s where we’re at. We’re at the most inspired portion of our careers, even after 30 years. There have been a lot of ups in our career, sometimes downs early on, but even those were fun as I said. There’s never not been a fun part.
Cryptic Rock – Very interesting to hear. It is completely understandable how you need to catch up like that after such a long run of being away, touring, and everything going. The new record, which you’re speaking of is The Forest Is the Path. This album, much like other Snow Patrol albums, sounds very personal. Your lyrics are always extremely personal, very relatable, even though they are from your own experiences. What was the writing and recording like for this record?
Gary Lightbody – The writing was a dream because the last two albums we’ve made, Fallen Empires (2011) and Wildness (2018), took a lot out of me. I had a writer’s block in both those albums… significantly more for Wildness. This time around, there were just words pouring out of me even before we started. Johnny (McDaid) and I got together down in the south of England in a little house to start writing it. I don’t normally write lyrics until there’s music, but lyrics were just pouring out.
I knew they were lyrics. I knew it wasn’t anything other than the words of this next album that were pouring out. I was writing them in notepads and on the notes app on my phone if I was walking around. I had lots of stuff written beforehand; which I am going to do for every album from now on. It was so great to be able to write something down on a blank page and make that page not blank anymore. That was the thing that was killing me over the years.
On the very first day of Johnny and I starting writing, at the top of the page I wrote “The Beginning,” for perhaps obvious reasons. The page was blank until I looked at my notes and I pulled the line, “I want to be in love without being loved in return.” I put that down on the page, and the rest of the song just expanded out from there. There was a seed like that for every single song that we did.
I wrote the lyrics for every song on the day that myself, Johnny and Nathan (Connolly) wrote the music to the song. There were no arduous weeks and months and even years trying to write the lyrics for the songs on this record. Even though it took six years for the record to come out. There are other reasons for that, one of which being we tried to record the record the first time and it didn’t work, which happens to every band at some point.
The lyrics themselves were not easy, but they weren’t arduous. They weren’t stuck. They were coming out reasonably in a flow, which hasn’t happened in a while. I don’t want to jinx anything going forward, but I’m very glad that it happened this time.
Cryptic Rock – Well, that is exciting to have that. Like you said, the time of slowing things down a little bit, catching up spiritually, letting your bodies catch up. Do you think that you are finally in a healthier head space where the writer’s block is gone and material is pouring out?
Gary Lightbody – Absolutely. This happened all throughout. I believe that Nathan and Johnny would agree with this. I’m not speaking for them, but I think I can safely say that if we were human tuning forks, I think we were all just resonating at the same pitch and frequency.
It felt like we were just finishing each other’s guitar parts. Somebody would have a little idea, and someone would pick up a guitar, and that idea would grow. Somebody would sit behind a piano and that idea would grow. It would just be effortless, making it sound unfought for.
We’ve put so much effort into our careers that maybe we were due a bit of easier time working on this one. It felt like we were all vibing off each other in a way that felt new, and also ancient. Johnny, Nathan and myself always felt like we’ve known each other for even longer than we’ve known each other. We are those types of brothers.
It feels like the music now that we’re making, is something that’s just been in us for a long time. All we needed to do was resonate at the same frequency to find it. Now we are.
Cryptic Rock – It certainly seems to be that way; because the album is very cohesive and flows very nicely. Looking at the words, your lyrics have always been one of the driving forces of Snow Patrol. They are very honest and self-reflective. As you said, they were not difficult, but they sort of were difficult. Was there a lot of pain involved in writing these feelings?
Gary Lightbody – No, actually, I think the pain was being drawn out as I was writing them. Whatever the pain. My dad passed away a few years back, and when he passed away, I went numb for a year. I couldn’t feel anything. I thought I was broken.
Then, almost a year to the day, something unlocked me. I felt like I was being unlocked. It was a poem that I read, and I just started crying. The next day I wrote. I started to write again; when I hadn’t written anything because I was feeling numb. You can’t write when you’re feeling numb. There’s nothing there.
The first song I wrote was about him, obviously. The second song I wrote was “These Lies,” which is obviously not about him. It felt like it was just pouring out. It was not like a venom being drawn out, but something that wasn’t meant to be held anymore. It was something that I was just meant to manifest or get out of the way of.
Most of the time, that’s how the lyrics felt. It was like – just get out of the way and let these words come out. I’ve been in my own way many times. I’ll be in my own way again in the future, I’m quite sure. I’m never done standing in my own way. When I was writing the lyrics for this record, I felt like I was able, as some qigong kind of move, to just stay out of the way of the lyrics as they were arriving. As I said, I’d done an awful lot of preparation for it as well. Maybe the preparation helped just clear the runway for everything to land.
No comment