Album Review: Snow Patrol - 'The Forest Is The Path'
Snow Patrol’s new entry is heartbreakingly vulnerable and sees them at their lyrical best.
Snow Patrol have built a reputation over the years for writing heartfelt love songs with an arms stretched energy to match lyrics about love and loss. But new album ‘The Forest Is The Path’ will surely go down as the most honestly vulnerable. The band booked out a studio in Somerset and on day one wrote the lead single from the album entitled ‘The Beginning’. A large chorus with the lyrics of:
“There is only you and me in this life
And I don’t wanna f*** it up now
There is nothing for me in these past lives
There is only what I wasn’t yet”
When discussing this process, Gary Lightbody said “Johnny and I went to this beautiful place in Somerset to start work on the album. We were only there for three days. I normally have an idea for a melody and then I will go away
and write the lyrics. And Johnny was like, ‘Why don’t you just write them now? And we can finish the song today.’ The first day we wrote The Beginning, start to finish. The second day we wrote Everything’s Here And Nothing’s Lost. And the third day we did Never Really Tire.
Perhaps it’s this new approach to lyrics first that presents them at their most vulnerable. The other song written in this process ‘Everythings here and nothings lost’ has such pain felt lyrics.
“Maybe i love you like the ocean
Like the ocean loves the sky
Never gonna find a way to reach you
No matter how I try
Maybe I can love you like the mountain
Like the mountain loves the snow
I can let you fall on me forever
Until it’s all we know”
The band however, couldn’t bottle the energy of their Somerset visit and started looking at different avenues. This led them to teaming up with producer Frazer T Smith, and this collaboration went on to create emotional album opener ‘All’. “I had written the song All with Fraser,” says Gary, “and the three of us started thinking,‘Shall we try working with him?’ We went in with him for a week and it’s no exaggeration to say that we were in love with him within the first half an hour. There’s a line in one of my favourite books, Grab On To Me Tightly As If I Knew The Way, where the lead character is talking about falling in love and goes ‘Something is happening here’. That phrase kept coming back to me. I could feel it in my bones. My atoms were changing. That something is happening here.”
There are some classic Snow Patrol throwbacks that are sure to please fans. ‘Hold Me In the Fire’ has the energetic, quick paced feel of earlier Snow Patrol work such as ‘You’re All That I Have’. This rings true in the next track on the album ‘Years That Fall’. It’s these two tracks right in the middle of the album that show Snow Patrol’s experience on how to balance out a record, giving it almost the feel of a setlist at a live show.
Words by Doug Dewdney
