A songwriting special with Johnny McDaid of Snow Patrol

Here’s a pub music quiz question for you: what do Paul Van Dyk, Ed Sheeran, Birdy, James Blunt, Kodaline, Harry Styles, Robbie Williams, Biffy Clyro and Tim McGraw have in common – apart, that is, from having arms, legs, hair, teeth etc. etc. and selling truckloads of records? You can confer if you want to… No? Well, they’ve all written monster hits with Johnny McDaid, the Snow Patrol guitarist who moonlights as one of the music world’s most sought after collaborators.

Normally to be found residing either in Malibu with his amour Courtney Cox or in London where he has his own FieldWork recording studio, the amiable 41-year-old is following up his attendance last night at the BRITS with a lightning trip to Dublin to pick up an IMRO Outstanding Achievement Award.

Strangely for a man who routinely packs out stadiums with his band, Johnny’s a bag of nerves.
“I’ll be okay when I have my acceptance speech written,” he smiles. “It’s such an honour, but also rather daunting because these are my peers. As for the people I’ve written with, I don’t really think in terms of genre – it’s all down to it being a good song or not. If I went into a room and said, ‘I do R’n’B or I do rock or pop’ it would be so limiting.

“I love that Bob Dylan idea of the butterfly net – reach up and pull down what comes along. But you can’t reach up, pull down a butterfly and say, ‘Actually, I wanted a sparrow’. Every song is different in the way that every DNA is different, but there are commonalities like transparency, openness, honesty, vulnerability, possibility… all the abilities that there are really.

“This may sound trite,” he adds, “but the first thing you need to do is connect with the person you’re writing with. I’ll maybe talk less and ask more. The curiosity and wonder and idea of ‘What if?’ is really important. When I’m working on a lyric or a theme with somebody, I’ll always ask, ‘Where does that come from?’

“One of the reasons I think I’m able to do what I do is because I’m not one of the best players in the world. Through necessity, I have to keep things simple rather than coating it in glitter. You don’t mirror ball a baby, so why do it to a song? I like the fact that I’m limited technically.”

What was the first record that made him think, “That’s just fucking magic!” as a kid?

“It was U2,” he shoots back. “The whole of the The Unforgettable Fire was a huge treasure for me. I was really lucky because my Dad taught me guitar at home, and then I got lessons from John O’Neill in this place in Derry called The Collective where it was about 10p a class. I was taught how to play The Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’ by the guy who wrote it, which was absolutely mind-blowing.”
As a close friend as well as a collaborator, Johnny has witnessed first-hand Ed Sheeran’s conquering of Planet Pop.

“I was a fan of Ed’s before I met him,” he recalls. “I got sent his Songs From Amy EP and loved it, so I reached out to him to write at a studio in Finsbury Park near where he was sleeping on a sofa at the time! We had three sessions arranged, but my dad got sick, so I sent an apology saying that I had to go home. It’s funny, when we wrote Multiply, we looked back at those old emails I’d written to his manager and his manager had written back to me. Then Ed came and opened up for Snow Patrol when we were doing the Fallen Empires tour. I’m always writing on the road, so Ed gravitated towards me and my studio – the studio being a laptop, a speaker and a microphone.”

A little while after that they set sail for America together.

“Yeah, I lived with Ed in Nashville – or what we thought was Nashville but ended up being a place called Hendersonville, which is like living in St. Alban’s and saying you live in London,” he reminisces. “Anticipating your next question, what happened in Hendersonville, Tennessee stays in Hendersonville, Tennessee! To me, Ed is more punk than any of the fake sounding Clash wannabes out there. He does it the way he does it, and he’s not to be told. There’s a real authenticity that permeates everything he does. When he signed first, they wanted him to change his name, dye his hair, get a band, lose weight and become this skinny little pipe-cleaner pop star. And Ed was like, ‘Well, that’s not who I am’. I saw him do it.”

VULNERABLE SPACE
Can he get his head round some of the songs he’s written with Ed –‘Nina’, ‘Bloodstream’, ‘Shape Of You’ and ‘Galway Girl’ among them – being streamed more than three billion times each?
“Absolutely not,” he winces. “Nor do I want to try. Maybe it’s a form of denial that there’s a system whereby these things become commoditised entities. I never think in terms of ‘units shifted’.”
While not quite the illustrated man that Ed is, Johnny has an impressive array of tattoos including one that also adorns Mr. Sheeran.

“The lyric one I’ve got on my left arm – ‘Nuair is gá dom filleadh abhaile, is tú mo réalt eolais’ – is an Irish translation from a Foy Vance song called ‘Guiding Light’,” he explains. “There’s a real history for me with that song because Foy came and played it to my dad when he was on his death bed. He said it was the best gig he’s ever played! ‘Guiding Light’ became a mantra for the whole family – they all got it tattooed on them. Then Ed got it as a tattoo, because Foy and I played it at his 21st birthday. It’s on my dad’s gravestone: it’s such a big thing for us.

“At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve this from my beautiful partner Courtney…”

Johnny pulls up his right-hand shirt sleeve to show me a somewhat rudimentary ‘CC’.

“Not to digress too much, but there’s quite a funny story behind it,” he resumes. “We were out for dinner one night and she said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a great idea if we got our initials tattooed on each other’s arms on the way home.’ I said, ‘Darling, I would have your initials tattooed on my head…’ So on the way home we dropped into a tattoo parlour, she drew this with the guy and he tattooed it on me. When he was done, it was like, ‘Alright, your go’ and she said, ‘No, I’ll do mine next week.’ And I’m still waiting!”

That Therapy? album, Suicide Pact - You First, comes to mind.

“Yeah, it was very like that!”

Is Johnny a happy/sad, drunk/sober writer or a combination of all four?

“I wouldn’t write a song because I’ve had a drink – the two don’t go hand in hand for me,” he responds. “I don’t want to be disconnected from myself or the other people I’m in the room with.”
Is there a sense, like there was in the ‘60s when Neil Diamond, Carole King, Phil Spector and Neil Sedaka were beavering away in their Brill Building cubbyholes, of Johnny “going to work” when he’s writing?

“The idea of this huge factory that produces song after song, almost like a conveyor belt, is interesting. Some of the best songs of all time were written in the Brill Building. I don’t ever think of music as a commodity. I don’t ever want to put it into a box and say that it’s a thing. When I approach songwriting it’s always from a very deeply human perspective. I don’t have an expectation – my job is to be completely collaborative and in service of the song.

“Being the singer in a band – as I was with Vega4 – didn’t work for me because I was so scared. There’s no more vulnerable space than when you are the voice, not just figuratively, but in the literal sense too. That feeling of being accepted or rejected – I didn’t have anybody at the time to tell me, ‘It’s safe to be who and what you are’. When then penny eventually drops, it’s therapeutic and cathartic and soulful.”

COMPREHENSIVELY HAPPY
Ladies and gentleman, there you have it, the essence of songwriting nailed in around a hundred words. Those of a poetic persuasion may have clocked that Johnny’s FieldWork studio is named after a 1979 collection of Seamus Heaney’s poetry.

“Seamus Heaney is such a creative character both musically and lyrically,” he proffers. “He was able to touch locally but reach globally. He was such an incredible poet – and I say poet in the truest sense of the word. He spoke for the people from his heart, but the words went global.

“I hear echoes of him in Gary (Lightbody). We were invited to play as Seamus read at St. Columb’s College in Derry, but two weeks before we were due to fly he passed away.”
Johnny has somehow managed to find the 25th hour in the day/eighth day in the week required to executive produce the new Kodaline album.

“It’s a very odd title and I can tell you now, I’m no executive!” he laughs. “What I do, I guess, is take an active role in every part of the record-making process. I’ve done it with Ed, and now I’m doing it with Kodaline. Even if I’m not writing or producing the song, all the mixes come to me. What I’m interested in is transformation. Where is a person now and how much can they open themselves up to new possibilities? Kodaline have always written great songs, but the new stuff is off the scale!”

It’s an interview for another day, but is Johnny looking forward to the unleashing in May of Snow Patrol’s sixth studio album, Wildness, and the two years of pretty much non-stop touring that will accompany it?

“The great thing about my life is that I get to do both – and I need to do both,” he ventures. “To work outside the band with artists and then be in a band with my best friends. I was a fan of Snow Patrol before I was in Snow Patrol. My coming into the band was a gradual thing, and my role within Snow Patrol is very different to my role outside of it. I think Gary is one of the greatest writers of our generation. He’s a brother to me, and my Snow Patrol role is to serve his songs.”

It’s refreshing to find somebody so comprehensively happy with their lot.

“Ten years ago I genuinely thought, ‘Nobody will ever get me’,” Johnny concludes. “To now be able to sit down and explore hope, joy and sadness with other people through our writing is an incredible thing.”