Snow Patrol
January 31, SSE Hydro, Glasgow
When Snow Patrol came to the end of touring their Fallen Empires album in 2012, the multi-million-selling indie-pop dependables decided to take a break from the arenas.
As frontman Gary Lightbody explains, the band – guitarists Johnny McDaid and Nathan Connolly, bass-player Paul Wilson and drummer Jonny Quinn didn't anticipate it would be seven years before they would be on the road again.
“We were exhausted,” Lightbody says. “We went from album to tour, album to tour for 10 years.We needed to take a break. And it just kind of kept extending. I just perhaps needed more time than I first thought.”
During those years, Quinn started a family, Connolly formed and fronted plucky rock outfit Little Matador, and Wilson and McDaid went into production work. Lightbody released the second album by Tired Pony – his super-group side project with Belle and Sebastian's Richard Colburn and REM's Peter Buck – and moved to LA where he began composing for films and co-writing for the likes of Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and One Direction.
He credits those cowrites as helping him shift what he considered to be writer's block, though it wasn't a new endeavour for him: back in the late 2000s Lightbody wrote the song that would become Just Say Yes for Gwen Stefani. When Nicole Scherzinger recorded it instead, the former Pussycat Dolls frontwoman even attempted a hint of a Northern Irish accent, in tribute to him.
By then Lightbody was used to others hearing his songs. Run, a hands-aloft ballad originally a hit for the group in 2004, sired multiple cover versions, most notably Leona Lewis's 2008's chart-topper, then the fastest-selling digital-only release in the UK.
As he explained later, Run was written in a “sh***y little room near Hillhead” after falling down the stairs at the Glasgow School of Art while "on a massive bender".
Similar images are evoked in A Youth Written In Fire, the nostalgic centrepiece of seventh album Wildness, released in May 2018. Like majestic opener Life On Earth, the song recalls the thrill of “first times” and crackles with memories.
Wildness "is defined by memory in a lot of ways," says Lightbody, who wrote much of the Jacknife Lee-produced album while seeing his father losing much of his own memories to dementia.
A Youth Written In Fire was written in one sitting while Lee and Connolly left Lightbody alone in the studio, Nick Cave's haunting Jesus Alone left on repeat.
“I wrote the whole song from word one to the last word in the minutes after I heard the car drive away,” he says. “After that, I went back to the other songs and listened to them and thought: 'Now I get it. This is an album about all the things that I’m afraid of'.”
“But instead of looking away or recoiling I wanted to stare right at them and not blink. My alcoholism, my dad’s dementia, my bleaker thoughts, and of course the world and what was happening in it."
Two years ago Lightbody stopped drinking, helped back to health by a friend celebrated in the joyful, hymn-like Heal Me. In the similarly big-hearted Empress, written for Lightbody’s god-daughters, he offers encouraging words of experience.
“This album tries to have some answers,” he says. “I think it’s the first record I’ve ever written that I haven’t just asked a bunch of questions. I actually tried to figure out why I was unhappy, why I feel out of place, why I’m afraid. I think I’ve been protecting myself for whatever reason. There’s nothing really to protect myself for. It’s all in the album.”
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