The Empire Strikes Back
When Gary Lightbody came down with writer’s block he wondered if he had another album in him. Then Michael Stipe popped around for a pep talk and he never looked back. The result? A return-to-form record from Snow Patrol that channels LCD Soundsystem and Arcade Fire whilst always sounding like the work of a bunch of lovable indie underdogs who somehow conquered the world.
Olaf Tyaransen, 04 Jan 2012
Do you think you have a Protestant work ethic?
“A what?” he laughs, mocking a horrified look. “What do you mean?”
Just that you never seem to switch off and
stop working...
“No, I don’t have that switch, or at least I’ve never been able to find it,” he admits. “I kind of like to go and work with other people to just see how they work. There’s a lot of years of touring with Snow Patrol between Tired Pony and The Reindeer Section, and I think that I got a little perhaps institutionalised, not the rest of the band, it’s no fault of theirs, it’s my own way of working, my own way of thinking, seeing the way other people do it helps me and that has to take place when the rest of the band have time off. I’m not going to stop in the middle of a Snow Patrol tour and go, ‘Hang on a minute lads, I need to go and make an album with someone else’.”
That’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not only will Snow Patrol be touring Fallen Empires for the next year, at least, they may also be releasing a companion album. There are plans to bring a mobile studio on the road so they can record while touring.
“There is talk of that, for sure, to try and knock this other album out. We’re more than halfway through this other album because we recorded two records at the same time in Santa Monica and Malibu.”
What’s the other record going to be called?
“I don’t know yet,” he says, thoughtfully. “It could be a companion piece to this album – Rising Empires. Or Fallen Empires II: The Revenge or something. I mean it’ll be something connected to this record and probably released sort of more pointed towards fans rather than a giant publicity campaign and just as a kind of a ‘This is what we did, too’ rather than ‘This is a brand new record’. So I don’t know how we’ll go about releasing that or even finishing it, but we’ll need a mobile studio to do it.”
Snow Patrol – still building empires then...
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Olaf Tyaransen
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