Interview: Snow Patrol

By Ricardo Baca | October 8th, 2009 | No Comments »

After a string of dates opening for U2, Gary Lightbody (center) and Snow Patrol are happy to be headlining again.

Not long ago, Gary Lightbody was asked by his U.S. record label to write a song for the new Gwen Stefani record. Lightbody, the lead singer and songwriter behind Snow Patrol, gave them a track for Stefani, who later passed on it. But when Snow Patrol’s U.K. label first heard the track, they couldn’t believe Lightbody hadn’t kept it for his own band.

“And so we reclaimed it for ourselves. It was originally a ballad, but now it’s far from that. They said, ‘You gave that to somebody else? What the (expletive) were you doing?,’ ” Lightbody remembers them saying of the track “Just Say Yes.” “And so we reclaimed it for ourselves. It was originally a ballad, but now it’s far from that.”

Indeed, Snow Patrol’s latest single, one of the three new songs on the forthcoming hits-and-favorites compilation “Up to Now,” isn’t a familiar ballad. “Just Say Yes” is an electronic-infused, ’80s-kissed track that sounds like a natural hit for the popular Scottish-Irish alt-rock export.

“It’s one of those songs that we’ve always had in us,” said Lightbody, who brings his band to the Fillmore Auditorium on Friday. “I’ve loved dance music since I was an 18-year-old kid going to nightclubs, so it was bound to happen at some point. But I’m surprised it took me 15 years.”

Even though Snow Patrol popped in the U.S. only in the last five years, Lightbody started playing with since-departed bass player Mark McClelland in 1994. And that time is the perspective Lightbody and his bandmates used to collect songs for “Up to Now,” slated for release Nov. 9.

It takes guts to release a compilation album — and real courage to release a double- disc compilation. The band is careful to point out it’s not a greatest-hits collection.