It’s been exactly thirty years since the Northern Irish alternative rock band Snow Patrol formed, though most people didn’t find out about them until 2003, when their third album Final Straw, gave them their first hit single, “Run.” Their next album, Eyes Open [2006], was an even bigger success, spawning the massive international hit “Chasing Cars.” In September, they released their eighth studio album, The Forest Is the Path, which has earned them much critical praise (and a rapturous reception from longtime followers). Calling from his home in Bangor, Northern Ireland, frontman Gary Lightbody tells The Big Takeover about this new album, the unique elements that influenced his songwriting, and why he thinks Snow Patrol’s music resonates so strongly with fans.
What was it like creating this album compared to the previous ones?
GARY LIGHTBODY: With this record, even before we started writing [the songs], I was writing a lot of lyrics. I knew even as I was writing them: “These are lyrics for the new album.” I just had a feeling. I had massive loads of notes in a book and on my phone, where it was just tons and tons of lines, fragments of things, and ideas for themes of the album. I’ve never done it like that before. I always thought, for almost thirty years, you write the music and then you write the lyrics, and that’s just the way it is. That was always the way for me. And this time around, on almost every song, there was at least one lyric that existed before the music was written, and that’s a totally different thing that happened just on this album.
What inspired you to do it that way this time?
GARY LIGHTBODY: I was reading a lot of classic literature. I went back to books that I’d read at university. I did an English degree, [but] most of the time I was in the rehearsal room with the band. So I’ve always thought about going back to university, just because I didn’t really experience it the first time – not the educational part of it. The music and the gigs part of it, yeah, for sure, but not actually learning much. But I reread Slaughterhouse 5. The central device of a person caught inside their life that just keeps falling into different times in their life – that, I think, is probably the main theme that I took and put it onto this record. I just allowed myself to be in any part of my life at any point. So when I’m singing a song, I’m singing it in the first person in the present tense, but I might be thinking it as my 30 year old self, or 35, or 25. It’s not me as I am now. I was trying to understand who I was, so I can better understand myself now. So a lot of this album is trying to make sense of myself and the relationships and friendships that I’ve had over the years, and the things that I’ve heard and experienced in my life, and wanting to allow myself the freedom to talk about them as if they’re happening right now in this moment.
Your lyrics are so evocative. How did you learn to write like that?
GARY LIGHTBODY: My favorite poet is Seamus Heaney. When I was fourteen [years old and] in English class, this new teacher came in and read this poem, “Digging,” from Seamus Heaney’s first book, Death of a Naturalist. I hadn’t really listened in school before that. And when he started reading, it felt like something was happening inside me as he was reading. It changed my whole life. So I put that poem, and Seamus Heaney himself, alongside Nirvana as the biggest influences in my musical career, because I was going nowhere at school up until that point. So yeah, reading poets who are that extraordinary, a tiny, tiny, tiny molecule or two of it maybe rubs off on a dimwit like me. But over time, I guess, those molecules maybe do build up into something – a tiny little pile of dust, but it might be enough to get by.
Snow Patrol has a distinctive sound – when you first started, did you have this in mind, or did it evolve into it?
GARY LIGHTBODY: We went through a lot of different modes and phases, I think. At the start, I was obsessed with Jeff Buckley. Not that I could ever sing like him in a million years, but I was obsessed with him. His album Grace [1994] had just come out. I think I was just trying to copy him, even though I couldn’t get near him. So then it kind of evolved from that. American music has definitely had a big influence on us. I’ve already mentioned Nirvana, but the whole Seattle scene was big in my teenage years for me. All those bands – Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden – they would be very generous with talking about other bands. It was kind of a musical education for me. Even though I said right at the start we were obsessed with Jeff Buckley, by the time [our] first album came out in 1998 Song for Polarbears, we were obsessed with that American alternative rock scene. I didn’t know how to write a chorus until about 2001, and then we found something of what it was we were meant to really be. I think melody is really what we’re obsessed with more than anything, and I think that’s the thing that’s been our constant companion, musically.
Your fans seem to really connect with your music to an unusually intense degree. Why do you think that happens?
GARY LIGHTBODY: I can only tell you what I feel when I listen to somebody else’s music – and when I hear somebody telling me their story, first of all, I’m intrigued. And secondly, I don’t think we can help ourselves from feeling whatever empathies that we have. When we hear the music, we can’t help but put ourselves in that same place. So I think people, if they’re connecting to our music, maybe are putting themselves in these places. I think they’re pretty universal themes of love and loss and pain and time. These are the themes of the record. They’re probably a theme of every record ever made. I want to write differently about these universal themes. I don’t want to keep on writing the same song over and over again. If I’m talking about love, I want to talk about it in a different way. On this record, I haven’t been in a relationship in over ten years, so it’s a viewpoint to love that I’ve never had, so I allowed myself to write about love in that way. That’s where you can see the whole landscape of your life from maybe a place where it is.
What compelled you to form this band in the first place?
GARY LIGHTBODY: Really, really wanting to make music. Really, really feeling that this is the only true way that I can express myself. And if I don’t do it, I’ll be doing myself a disservice. We were playing to ten or twenty people a night for [this band’s first] ten years. You can imagine what my parents were saying, and what the rest of the guys’ parents were saying, and what our friends were saying. I had to have had belief in what we were doing to last that long. But I don’t think it was like a desperation. I think it was just a calling. I’m not saying in any kind of great spiritual way. I mean it in like, there was a sound that I was hearing in my head constantly, and I had to write it down, and I had to sing it, and I had to play it, or else I would go mad.
After thirty years, what keeps you motivated to continue doing this?
GARY LIGHTBODY: It’s the reaction in the audience. That’s what makes it different every night. Every single crowd is different. And also, when you hear an audience sing a song back to you, you have this extraordinary internal experience where you remember writing the song. “Run”, for example – I was in my bedroom in a house where we didn’t have any electricity and we were always broke, and I was dreaming of another time. And that’s what the song is about: dreaming of a way to protect my family, dreaming of a different place, a different world. And it somehow manifested that song. People probably say that “Chasing Cars” is the most important song we ever wrote, in terms of how big it got, but it’s not that. It’s “Run.” “Run” was the first successful song we ever made, and it’s not because it was successful that it’s important. It’s because it meant that we got to do what we’d always wanted to do, which was travel the world and play our music to people. That’s what we always dreamed of. Not fame. Not success. Not money. Going to different places all around the world, having extraordinary experiences, and playing our music to people that liked it.
What’s next for you?
GARY LIGHTBODY: We’re going back into the studio in a week’s time to start recording some more songs, so we’re not resting on our laurels – even after 30 years!
For upcoming Snow Patrol tour dates/tickets, visit https://snowpatrol.com/live/
