Snow Patrol EP was cowritten with fans during pandemic
Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody hasn’t been able to get together with his bandmates — for both geographic and safety reasons.
But that hasn’t stopped him from writing new songs.
Snow Patrol released “The Fireside Sessions EP” on Friday a set whose five songs were composed by Lightbody with fans who attended his weekly “Saturday Songwrite” sessions on Instagram Live. The tunes were mashed together from ideas all those present threw out and subsequently arranged and recorded by Lightbody and the rest of Snow Patrol, along with producer Iain Archer.
The fans, meanwhile, get credit as the Saturday Songwriters, while the Trussell Trust Charity, a network of foodbanks in the UK, will be the beneficiary.
And from his home in Los Angeles Lightbody tells us these “Sessions” will yield even more music in the near future.
Q: How’s the quarantine going on your end?
Lightbody: Y’know, it’s been all right. I’m not exactly agoraphobic, but I like being indoors. So I’m not climbing the walls. I’ve got my guitar and everything, so I’m fine.
Q: How did the “Saturday Songwrite” come about?
A: Well, I’m on Instagram Live doing gigs a lot, covers and whatnot. So I just thought, “I’m gonna try writing songs.” I’d been in a real purple patch of writing, so I thought I’d try doing it on Instagram Live and see if it’s even viable. The very first time was kind of a test, really. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know if it was gonna work, really.
Q: What was the process?
A: I asked people for chords. I asked them to pick a letter between A and G, then pick the next four letters, and I would make a guitar pattern with those chords, and then I would make up a melody over the top of it, and I would do it four times, so there were four melodies and I would get people to vote on what their favorite melody was. Then I would ask for some lyrics. I’d write down as many lyrics as they could shout out in 25 minutes. Then I went offline for an hour and pieced everything together. I would try to use at least one idea from somebody in every line and maybe add a word here or there as connecting fibers. Once we wrote a song that first day — “Dance With Me” on the EP — from then on it was really fun.
Q: Songwriting is such a personal process. How hard
was it to acclimate to a committee of many?
A: It was a whole lot of fun. I didn’t have any nerves hitting the button to start the live show, even with a blank piece of paper in front of me. The hardest part of writing a song for anybody, I would imagine — certainly for me — is lyrics. And when you get thousands of people giving you lyrics, that makes the whole process a lot easier,
a lot quicker and a lot more fun. It’s the lyrics that can sometimes have you pulling your hair out and gnashing your teeth, but to make it a collective experience was quite liberating, really.
Q: Thematically, were you surprised by what people wanted to sing about — or wanted you to sing about?
A: It wasn’t difficult to find themes in the songs. There were a lot of similar things that were on people’s minds — either the isolation or the lockdown they were in the middle of, or things they were looking forward
to doing whenever the lockdown ends. People’s lyrics were brilliant — really, really brilliant. Ninety-five percent of these lyrics aren’t mine; They’re a collective and they’re really, really good and I’m very happy there’s on a Snow Patrol record. It’s not just, “Oh, these are good for this project.” These are good for ANY project.
Q: Did the rest of the band enjoy the uniqueness as well?
A: Absolutely. That’s the second part of the process, of course, recording. Iain Archer, who produced
the record, did an amazing job ’cause everybody’s scattered to the four winds, so he had the rough end of the stick. Everybody’s working for free ’cause it’s for charity, and he was working 20hour days for four weeks on these tracks, just in the studio the whole bit. It was incredible work he did to get this done, and he never complained once.
Q: Will the other songs you wrote with the Saturday Songwriters come out at some point?
A: It will. The idea originally was we’d make an album, but that album would’ve taken God knows how much time to make. There’s another seven songs at the moment and I’m gonna do another “Saturday Songwrite” on (Aug. 22) and that’ll be once more with feeling, one final times. That’ll be eight songs and we’ll record those in a simpler way, maybe acoustically with a few elements rather than a full kind of production, and then we’ll put them up on something like Bandcamp rather than the full release like we’re doing with this EP. It’s a lot of work, so we want to make it as easy as we can.
Q: What else is on tap for Snow Patrol, as much as you can plan anything?
A: We haven’t seen each other since just before Christmas. We’re talking about (2021). There’s some festivals in Europe that are aiming to go ahead and hopefully that’ll happen. We’re writing a little bit to, too, to see what happens. It’s important to get back into a way of making and sharing music, so we’re just trying to figure it out like everybody else.