The Forest Is The Path

The Forest Is The Path

Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024

Snow Patrol

Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody says the band’s new record was a process of two extremes. The first was the group’s initial attempt at making an eighth album, an undertaking that hit a dead end and left the indie-rock trio from Northern Ireland wondering where to go next. “It was genuinely nobody’s fault,” Lightbody tells Apple Music. “It was a constellation of things but it was a chaotic mess and we were very stressed. We were also on a deadline—technically, the record should’ve come out a year earlier. We now know never to work to a deadline again, because that’s no way to make art.”

Lightbody and bandmates Nathan Connolly and Johnny McDaid regrouped and gave it another go. In Stormzy and Adele producer Fraser T. Smith, they found a collaborator who made the creation of The Forest Is the Path feel like a comparative walk in the park. “The second time we made it was so calm and it all filtered down from the way Fraser not just works in the studio, but lives his life—calm and chill, sweet and funny,” Lightbody says. “There was so much laughter and silliness. It took five months the first time and five weeks the second time.”

You can almost hear the relief lighting up The Forest Is the Path, a record of space and breadth, where the band’s long-established melodic knack has room to recline over expansive, atmospheric instrumentation. All the Snow Patrol hallmarks are present and correct—stirring pop-rock sing-alongs, poignant balladry, and uplifting contemplatives delivered by a band that sounds like it has a new lease of life. “I firmly believe this is the start of something,” states Lightbody. “We’re 30 years into a career. We’ve never been here before, we’re in uncharted territory no matter what we do.” Read on as Lightbody guides us through Snow Patrol’s new dawn, track by track.

“All”

“Fraser and I went in together for the first time to write in October, November 2022 and we’d never met. He was the first outside person I’d written a song with for Snow Patrol. It’s a kind of blind date. You arrive in a room, and the intention is to write a song in a day. I walked in and Fraser had the guitar around him and was like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. What do you think of this?’ I hadn’t taken off my coat yet and we were already in it. I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds great!’ I started singing something, took my coat off and started writing words down and we had the song in an hour.”

“The Beginning”

“When Johnny and I got together in earnest to write the record, it was ‘The Beginning’ that we started with. I had been writing a lot of lyrics over the last three or four months, in notepads and notes on my phone. I had that line ‘I wanna be in love/Without being loved in return.’ It just sprung up from there. Johnny came up with the piano part and I started singing the melody over that and working on the lyrics. He worked more on the music, him and his team. Will Reynolds is credited on this song and one or two others on the record, he’s one of Johnny’s guys and he came up with that incredible wonky, woozy guitar part in the chorus.”

“Everything’s Here and Nothing’s Lost”

“‘The Beginning’ was done on the first day we were writing in Somerset and this was done the second day. Johnny and I were just sparking off each other. I came up with a little melody and it happened pretty quickly. I wandered around the garden, writing the lyrics, and it was beautiful sunny day. When I came back in, Johnny had that really massive chorus. It was even bigger originally but it was so big that people’s ears would’ve been blown off because they’d be turning up the quiet bit of the song and then we would pulverize them with a loud bit.”

“Your Heart Home”

“This was recorded by me at home on GarageBand, and then I sent it to Fraser and Scott, who engineered the record, and they brought it into glorious Technicolor. I’m half-decent at GarageBand, but I’m not a producer. My production is more about the ideas of what the song needs than the actual technical ability of manifesting that. When we all got together in the studio on this one, it really started to shift and move and grow. It was not what I was expecting it to be and I love that.”

“This Is the Sound of Your Voice”

“It’s a slightly strange melody for us. The first time I played this to someone I really trust and love and work with quite a lot, he went, ‘It’s just like a West End musical melody.’ I hadn’t even thought of that. Johnny put in so much intricate detail into this song. There were 200 strands of audio on it. Johnny does it so beautifully where everything is played, everything is real, everything is an authentic sound—he does an awful lot of found sounds. I think that’s why it doesn’t overload everything and everything finds its place in the song and some things come in and out. Johnny did a beautiful job, as did Nathan. The guitars are so beautiful and incredible all the way through.”

“Hold Me in the Fire”

“Johnny and I wrote it in his house. Right from day one, it sounded like a rock song that was going to expand outwards and we’d just have to get out of its way and let the balloon inflate. But when we got in to record it the first time, it didn’t do that. It felt like we were adding and nothing was happening. It’s a hard puzzle to fix because you’ve got to keep taking it apart and putting it back together again, and sometimes it just doesn’t ever fit together right. This is the thing about going in with Fraser: Everything we put on [with him], it felt like it was expanding, it felt like it was inflating in a very good way. Everything was floating up into the sky and it started to make a lot of sense. Fraser helped an awful lot. And Nathan’s guitars on it are just absolutely scorching.”

“Years That Fall”

“This was me in the house in Bangor. I wrote it on GarageBand and it actually was an unusual little thing to begin with, not the rock song that it turned into. There was a lot of that version we drew from, but in the studio, this absolute monster appeared. This small, rock, chuggy, indie-ish thing just went off somewhere else. It was really exciting.”

“Never Really Tire”

“Jesus Christ, the work that Johnny McDaid put into this—again, another 200-plus pieces of the song. And the way things come in and out, you can just play any section of the song and there’ll be something different happening. Right from the start, I had this vision of an eagle flying over a forest canopy. It can see the tree line rise and fall and undulate like waves in the deep ocean and that’s what I wanted this drum part to be. I was explaining it to Ash [Soan, drummer], thinking, ‘He’s going to think I’m fucking insane,’ and he went, ‘Yep, got it.’ We were like, ‘We’ll play this whole thing live as a spontaneous thing, see what happens.’ It was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve had in the studio. That vision that I’d had for this song just came to life.”

“These Lies”

“I’d been numb for the year since my dad died. This was late 2020. I didn’t cry or I couldn’t feel anything. I thought I was broken. I thought that was it, forever. It was a couple of days before the anniversary, and I read a Rumi poem and burst into tears. The tears came like a torrent. A year’s worth of tears were just pouring onto the floor. And then, the next day I was exhausted. I went to sleep. The next day, I woke up and I was like, ‘I feel connected to something.’ I felt like, ‘I need a pen and a piece of paper right now,’ and I wrote a song about my dad. And then a song that followed about 10 minutes after that was ‘These Lies,’ which obviously wasn’t about him, and that came out in a flow state as well. It was just like all these things were trapped in there behind the tears that wouldn’t release.”

“What If Nothing Breaks?”

“This is all Johnny’s production. It went through many different forms. It started as a Motown song with a Motown beat, and it had a different chorus. It wasn’t quite working, something felt wrong about it. Johnny was playing around the chords of it and I was singing it in a different way and it felt like, ‘Oh, this is the place for this song, feels like it needs to be here.’ Then I came in one day and he was like, ‘What about these for the chords for the chorus?’ and I started singing the chorus as it became, and the song just came to life.”

“Talking About Hope”

“I’m proud of the lyrics on this record. I’ve allowed myself to be open to whatever happens rather than trying to force my way to the words, which sometimes has to happen if you’re staring at a blank page for months on end. This time around, there was no writer’s block. This song came from a true place, especially the verses. I love the lyrics and the verses. I don’t really say that about my own lyrics very often.”

“The Forest Is the Path”

“Michael Keeney deserves a big mention on this record. He produced Foy Vance’s Joy of Nothing, which for me is the greatest album by a Northern Irish artist, and produced many other things besides. He wrote and produced some of the strings on this record. We were in his studio and Nathan was playing that lead line. I recorded it on my phone and took it home and built the song around it on GarageBand. I sent that to Fraser and the thing that goes the whole way through the song, Nathan’s guitar, that’s the recording on my phone. I find that a quite nice way to finish a record—the spontaneity captured in one moment without having to go, ‘OK, well let’s go and set up the microphones.’ It was just like, ‘Oh, I love that, can I use that?’”