Snow Patrol lead singer Gary Lightbody talks to Atwood about staying motivated 30 years into his career, what he learned from touring with U2, and the philosophy of time that influenced the band’s new album, ‘The Forest Is the Path.’
‘The Forest Is The Path’ – Snow Patrol
In the summer of 1998, Snow Patrol played their first live show at the Duke of York pub in Belfast.
There were about 30 people in attendance that day to see the band that would go on to sell out stadiums.
Now, 30 years after first forming the band and 26 years after that first show, Snow Patrol are back with their eighth studio album, The Forest Is the Path. The album comes on the heels of a summer full of festival performances and is now available everywhere via Polydor Records.
Even after 30 years, Snow Patrol aren’t showing any signs of slowing down – The Forest Is the Path contains some of the band’s best work. For Gary Lightbody, the band’s lead singer, the bond between him and his bandmates has only grown stronger over the years.
“We’re a family, and it means so much to us to make music together and to just be together,” Lightbody tells Atwood Magazine. “We’re always looking for reasons to be in the same room. Thirty years is just a number.”
The Forest Is The Path is Snow Patrol’s first album with renowned producer Fraser T. Smith, who has worked with Adele and Sam Smith, among other high-profile artists. Along with bringing in a new producer, the band also wanted to let go of some of the inhibitions that had built up over time.
“We took off any restrictions that I had maybe placed on us over the years,” Lightbody says. “Whatever songs came to us – whatever way they arrived – we tried to let the song be whatever it wanted to be. You just allow yourself to make the music in the way the music wants to be made. So it felt like there was a real flow to this record.”
This approach to songwriting produces stunning results on The Forest Is The Path, as album opener “All” reveals. From the very start, the record showcases Lightbody’s poetic lyricism:
This is not a love song
I’m just checking that your light’s still on
I just want to feel like I belong
But I don’t know where I am
I’ve not quite broken everything I’ve loved
That’s why I hold you in museum gloves
And you can ask me anything you like
But just don’t ask me why I’m like this
The song then breaks into one of the album’s many anthemic choruses, with Lightbody’s baritone soaring into a higher register above a propulsive bassline and shimmering guitars:
All I know is holding you is all I ever want to know
But maybe I’m not brave enough to tell you so
But I don’t have the strength to watch you go
Oh, they say it’s better to have
loved at least, but reel it in
It wasn’t that I wasn’t feeling anything
More like feeling everything at once
How we perceive and move through time is one of the primary themes of the album, and it’s an idea Lightbody pondered and experienced deeply while the album was coming together.
“Time is not linear,” he says. “We all have our own time. It speeds up and slows down depending on how fast our heart is beating, or whether we are in a moment of joy or sadness or heartbreak. So I like this idea of messing with time, which is an idea that is pervasive on this record.”
“Everything happens at once,” he continues. “I read Carlo Rovelli’s book The Order of Time, which is an extraordinary book that postulates that we are experiencing all of time all at once. I lost my father a few years back, and I still see him everywhere. That’s what that idea means to me—that he is existing in the ephemera, perhaps in my peripheral vision, but he’s there. And then when I turn around, he’s not there. But there are moments when he’s still alive. That’s more of what this album is about than love.”
But in the second verse of “All,” Lightbody goes on to admit that “I guess this is a love song after all.” As that line suggests, love still shows up throughout The Forest Is The Path, often in conjunction with these thoughts on time and how we experience its passing.
“The love on this album is love from the distance of time,” Lightbody says. “I haven’t been in love in over ten years, so it’s the only way I can write about love at the moment. The way I try to explain it is that being in a relationship is like standing in the lobby of the Empire State building. And breaking up from a relationship is like standing outside in the street looking up at the Empire State Building. You can see the building, but you no longer have access to it. But not being in a relationship for years—you’re standing in Brooklyn, looking across the East River at the New York skyline.”
One way Lightbody writes above love from this more distant perspective on The Forest Is The Path is by exploring his own thoughts and feelings through the imagined lives of characters he has created.
On “What If Nothing Breaks?” he tells the story of two people faced with the possible dissolution of their relationship. The song has a cinematic texture to it, with pulsing chimes and subtle swells dipping in and out of the arrangement. The lyrics feel like they are describing a scene from a movie as well. You can almost see the camera sweeping in on these two characters:
He stops just before he says
“Oh, I never lived before you
And I sure as hell won’t live after you’re gone”
She waits for the words to come
But they never fill the silence
And it seems like silence now is all they have
The chorus, which is written as a snippet of a conversation between these two characters, cuts to the heart of the tension:
He says, “I don’t know how to make this right”
She says, “Well, just stop
trying to make this right
And what if nothing breaks,
what were you bracing for?”
She says
“It’s not necessarily about me,” Lightbody says of the song. “It’s more an amalgam of people I know. And I’m sure I’m infused in that anyway, because it’s very hard to separate yourself from these things.”
“It’s about the idea of this person trying to fix something,” he adds. “But as has happened in relationships with me, sometimes you’re thinking, ‘Just listen to me. Don’t try to fix this – just listen.’ It’s probably a conversation I’ve had in my life, but I’ve set it between these two characters that I developed a lot of fondness for as I was writing. You’re desperate for them to make it, but you don’t know if they do.”
Snow Patrol have spent the summer electrifying crowds at festivals in the UK, Ireland, and beyond, and they will be embarking on a tour of the UK and continental Europe beginning in early 2025. Lightbody credits much of the band’s showmanship to their stint opening for U2 earlier in their careers.
“I believe there is a difference between a ‘gig’ and a ‘show,’” Lightbody says. “We spent the first ten years of our musical lives playing very small venues to not many people. And they were not shows – they were gigs. We didn’t know how to put on a show. Then we went on tour with U2, and we got to watch U2 every night, and they taught me how to make a show. Bono is able to reach out into the audience and sing to every single member of that audience, whether they are in the front row or up in the gods, and make them all feel like they are experiencing an intimate show.”
“I was just in awe of it,” he continues. “So I realized that the responsibility of the singer was to make sure that no matter how big the venue was, what mattered was making sure everybody in that place was experiencing the show for themselves.”
Alongside their packed schedule of live performances, Lightbody and his bandmates are in the midst of a period of intense creativity.
So even as they tour in support of The Forest Is The Path, they will soon be rushing back to the studio to record new music.
“We’ve written more songs, and we’re going in to record them in November,” Lightbody says. “We’re never really stopping or slowing down.”
If you visit the Duke of York pub in Belfast today, you’ll see a plaque on one of the walls commemorating Snow Patrol’s inaugural performance at the venue back in 1998. It’s a recognition of the band’s storied legacy—one that includes massive radio hits and live shows all over the world. And with The Forest Is The Path, the band has gifted us a stunning reminder that their legacy is still being written.
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