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snowpatrolfanclubbrazil · 6 years

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By Paul Mcnamee

Chasing Cars was the UK's most widely played song of the Noughties. But after global success, Snow Patrol have been quiet for seven years. Frontman Gary Lightbody was drawn into the 'dirt darkness' by drink and depression but now, he tells Paul McNamee, he's found his way home.

Gary Lightbody's moment came two years ago in a gym in Santa Monica. The Snow Patrol frontman has long had a reputation of indulging his appetites. But even he was going at in on a bigger scale, with a fierce, Valhallan vigour. The band's last tour had finished in late 2012.an then: "I started drinking." he says, "with a gusto that a professional boxer might train for a prize fight. It'd be mostly beer, I was quite a happy drunk. There was a hell of a lot of fun. Until it wasn't.

"I'd get to 2am sitting on my own, have a cry, and then a glass of something [stronger], I didn't have any relationships and I wasn't having sex either.I was very hermetic. Around 2015/2016 I was drinking every day and also I was hating it. I regret doing it even though I knew I was doing it out of compulsion" He was hitting the gym in the mornings to sweat it off. Then came the moment.

"I bent down to touch my toes and everything started spinning. It felt like the floor beneath me was moving. I thoughy it was an earthquake. But I kept going on. I phoned a friend who lived around the corner. I was like, 'Are we having an earthquake?' He said "Something's going on here'.

"I had a bunch of CT scans on my head. My whole head was infected - sinus, ears, eyes, everything. I'd been having styes and stuff on my eyes. Stick a teabag on it. This was the week before I was going to France to see Northen Ireland play in their first tournament i 30 years. I siad to the doctor, 'I'm flying to France in five days'. He's like, "No, you're not. If you fly with the air pressure it's feel like daggers ripping into your head'. I was still thinking maybe I'll be alright. I spoke to a friend, Gabrielle, an acupuncturist, an extraordinary human being. She'd been trying to get me to stop drinking for while..." So he stopped. Or at least, he began to stop. And in flooded the dark realities he'd been masking.

In recent weeks, as he's been working around the release of Wildness, Snow Patrol first album in seven years, Lightbody has started to talk for the first time about the mental health problems which have plagued him for year. ("I didn't talk about anything, nobody knew, the band didn't know.") Last year, after 12 months sober, came another key moment.

"Last summer", he says, "I thought I'd be relieved to get the album done. We'd just finished. But I wasn't. I was devasted. I'd opened a place in my psyche and I didn't know how to shut the door. It was like ark of the covenant was opened [from Raider Of The Lost Ark] and there were melting faces left and right and I didn't know how to shut the thing down. So instead of talking to somebody I tried to shut myself out. Let my own face melt. And the band knew something and they flew from London and arrived at the door and I broke down and told them everything.

I have a depressive personality that has no relationship with reality. I could be having the best time on the surface and yet my depression goes 'You're still a cunt. Don't forget that. I'm dragging you down into the inkand the dirt and the darkness'. I could be playing to 15,000 people and three hours later be in a hotel room cruying on the floor. That's happened a bunch of times. The depression and the success have no relation to each other. It's just part of me. I've learned that rather than running from it, which you can never really do - you can have and turn and face it and look it in the eyes and say I'm not afraid of you any more".

And so he went home. Back to Northen Ireland, to North Down where he was brought up. It's the place he was desperate to leave in 1994, whe he ran to Dundee to star university, to start a band , to start years of chipping away with no success. Then he wrote Run and everything changed.

It's easy, given their time away, to forget just how huge Snow Patrol were for a period from the mid to late Noughties, Nobody, really, was bigger. The song Chasing Cars, from fourth album Eyes Open, was picked up for UA his TV show Grey's Anatomy and propelled them to massive fame. Lightbody moved to Santa Monica around 2009. ("Soon as my feet hit the sand in Santa Monica something just hit and I thought, I want to live here") Recently he claimed he'd moved back to Northern Ireland because the band were getting ready to work again and he needed to be near them. But it feels like the truth is little more complicated.

"You're right. There are quite few reasons. My dad isn't well, my mum isn't coping very well and my niece is going to be 11 in July, I've missed most of her life living in LA.

"And I missed home. It's a time in Northern Ireland as well when it feels like we're at a bit of a crossroads again. I felt a bit of a calling back here. Not that I figure I can help in any way, but I certainly won't feel connected if I'm 5,000 miles away I wanted to reconnect". We're meeting in the Crawfordsburn Inn, the picture post card hotel not far from Gary's shorefront home, overlooking Belfast Lough.

It feels timely. We meet on the 20th anniversay of a concert in Belfast's Waterfront Hall, hosted by U2, that helped deliver a huge Yes vote in the referendum for the Good Friday Agreement. In a nation where defiant, No's had been the lingua franca, a Yes was significant. A political statement and a cleansing.

On that day, John Hume and David Trimble were ushered onstage by Bono , a man with a keen eye for a moment, U2 sang Don't Let me Down. Ash were there too, being young and hopefull. Twenty years on, as Lightbody says, Northern Ireland is at a bit of a crossroads. And he's found his way home. The album, Wildness, is worth the wait. If Snow Patrol had touched on themes of running and movement in the past, Wildness has a leitmotif of finally settling; The word 'home' is laced throught several songs. Two tracks in particular illustrate what Snow Patrol can really do - the anthemic reach of the huge, wondroug openning track Life on Earth ( a track that took Gary five years to complete) and the intimancy of What If This Is All The Love You Ever Get?), a piece with just Gary on piano, a heartbreaker written for a friend going through a divorce.

The song Soon marks another significant theme. It deal with Lightbody's father Jack's battle with Alzheimer's . It's a simple builder, full of grace note and sadness. There is a something quietly heroic in it. The video, filmed in Lightbody's apartment, sees him and his fater watching old home movies his dad recorded throught the years. As well as the sadness over what his father is losing, there is an understanding of a farewell to lost youth that the hopefulness of that other country is worth revisiting for both of them. "I love my dad," he says. "I have a lot of respect for him so I wanted to honour him, but at the same time I also have a lot of guilt for being away for most of my adult life. I don't just mean LA, I mean Glasgow, London, or on tour constantly. And there is probably a place in my head where I go when I'm feeling somesick and that is both a place of calm and nostalgia and also a place of guilt and some shame.

"I've felt I've been running away most of the time from myself. So [he pauses]...someof the home references are me feeling disconnected rather than connected...feeling like I'd never really found a home. I never truly felt at home when I was growinh up in Northern Ireland. Then I left and never really felt at home anywhere else. And then I moved back to Northen Ireland and now I do feel at home here, but that has also coincided with me feeling at home inside my own body. Which was the whole problem the whole time. I wasn't comfortable with myself, I didn't like myself. So you have to figure that out before you can feel at home anywhere.

The band's influence and legacy go beyond their own work. They've helped shape the sounds that have become pervasive in post-millennial pop. Lightbody and band member Johnny McDaid have written with, among others, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and One Direction. Snow Patrol took Sheeran on the road in the States in 2011, helping him break through. They remain close. "Between myself and Johnny McDaid, we're written a lot of things for other pop acts, him more than me", he say. "I would say Ed came fully formed from his first album. He'd done the groundwork. All the grafting that you need to do, when you're a young band. He busked his ass off from the age of 15 on the streets of London, sleeping on his mate's couch. He had turned up to gigs and said to promoter, can you give me 15 minutes after the doors open. And promoters say aye. That's how he started. He grafted harder and still does to this day - harder than anyone I know. Sheeran's returning the favour, taking the the band on an American tour autumn.

Refusing to accept Snow Patrol as fountainheads of a sound, Lightbody says they are more like Zelig, "probably bystanders". One got away, though. Mutual friend James Corden introduced Lightbody to Adele.

"It happened to be a birthday of somebody that James and Adele knew...and I sat down with her and she said when are we going to do [a song]. We did two days - Adele, Johnny McDaid and me - the bones of three really amazing fucking songs. But we never got round to finishing it. And then the album came out and obviously we weren't on it."

While his own album has just come out, there is already preassure to get busy on the next. Long time producer, friend and mentor Garret "Jacknife" Lee has been in touch ("he says we need to get cracking on the next one"). For now, ahead of their own arena tour in the winter, Lightbody is learning to cope, listening to podcasts ("StuffyouShouldKnow from HowStuffWorks is my favourite one") and Bon Iver ("I think he's the finest songwriter alive") and working things out.

"Me, now not drinking, I like myself but I'm socially awkward, I'd rather be sitting with bandmates, my family. I'm 41. I know what I want.

And that is?

"Peace I want to make sure that every day of my life I take a moment and realise eveything is calmer. I've learned how to meditate, learned how to do Qigong. Learned a whole load of practices that I do every day. They mitigate the madness. The greatest thing I ever did for my own emotional wellbeing was to talk."

And if we went back 20 years, and said here are the successes, here are the demands it'll make on you mentally, personally, physically - would you have taken it? "I would have taken it for half the successes I can't believe what happened to us. I still can't believe when I look back at it, at everything that is successful that has been good. At everything that is still happening. It is a dream, It's a bloody dream."

#snow patrol #gary lightbody #article #news #interview

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dylanholyhellobrien · 6 years

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shimmer, magic, blush, sparkle, starlet? sorry it's a lot but I'm curious :)

Oh no, don’t apologize! This is awesome and sososo sweet. I love that you are curious!

Shimmer; Zodiac sign?: I’m a Libra, but I’ve never really been a big believer of astrology. So it’s not something that really matters to me 😅

Magic; Favorite film?: This one is though. I don’t watch a lot of movies and when I do, its mostly my faves from my childhood because I’m a sucker for nostalgia. But I guess I’ll have to say it’s a tie between Dead Poet’s Society and Girl, Interrupted. Its just two so amazing movies with incredible storylines, messages and character developments and they are so beautifully made. I can watch them over and over again and never get tired of them.

Blush; have you been to a concert? If so, which one(s)?:I’ve been to a lot of concerts. Most of them at the various music festivals I’ve been at over the last 10 years. I’ll only mentions the ones that has left an impression on me though and those amazing concerts have been: My Chemical Romance, Marilyn Manson, System Of a Down, Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes, Motionless in White, the Cure, Saybia, Magtens Korridorer, Tina Dickow, Dúné, Slayer and I’m probably forgetting a few. But seeing all these artists live was so fucking great.

Sparkle; Dream job?:Being a fictional writer. It’s been my biggest dream since I started working on my first book when I was like five years old 😂

Starlet; What historical period is most interesting to you?:This one is a thoughie too because I’m a fucking history nerd. I used to by this really expensive history magazine each month back when I had money just to read the exciting and educating articles. And fuck, I find all periods interesting in each of their own way - but I’ve always had something for World War II since first grade and we had to interview a family member about their childhood. I chose my great grandmother and she told me about how it was being a teenager in Denmark when the Germans invaded the country. And from that day on, I read everything I could about the war, loved every class we had about it in school and even wrote three pretty big assignments on both Nazism and Neo-nazism. Oh, and I went to the same high school as the boys from the first danish resistance group against the Germans went to and the only living member of the group held a lecture there my last year. It was fucking unbelievable. So yeah. I guess I’ll have to say world war II and I don’t really know if it’s a historical period per say, but it’s at least a part of one them 😅

Thank you so much for sending this 💙

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mikazukikannagisjourney · 4 years

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Pink Full Moon in Libra, April 7 (or 8, depending on where you are) 2020 - Plus Updates on Post-Jupiter Pluto Conjunction - Timeless

Hi all, how was the 4/4/2020 Gateway doing for you? I hope it was OK. This will be just a wordvomit update on the energies and possible aftermaths of the energetic gateways that opened up in the same time as the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in Aquarius on April 4 (or 5), a few days ago.

If you got to join the global peace meditation on that same gateway, I pray that the energies were gentle, healing and eye-opening. But if you got tired, dizzy, really emotional, and felt like your life just couldn’t fall apart even more, well, I feel you fam, I feel you. Same here. I was participating in some group meditations a few days before that and when the portal opened I just felt really weak and tired and my old back pain issue popped up again, it’s inflamed. Talk about the body telling you things. **sigh** It’s like Dark Night of the Soul for the nth time, again. And I was like “Really? SMH” T_T It’s like opening another can of worms, it just takes so much of the happiness away (read: dementors). It also pushed me to just hide even more and ruminate and do everything I can to process the emotions away. I did all of the tools that I knew and despite still feeling icky, I am believing that things can still get better. But truth be told, if you have been doing the inner work, crummy things like these have been cyclical and have been going through our lives each time we unearth some parts and release them. The energetic portals and gateways just unclog the collective in general, and as way-showers (we can also be called frontliners, energetically) we get to face the low vibrational stuff first hand. Not all of them are ours, but are really just the collective gunk that gets released even though it feels like they are entering through our bodies and making us face the dark parts of ourselves, again (because they’re in layers and thus we have to remove them in layers too. It sucks but that’s how it works, it can’t be helped).

And fighting all the demons will take time. - Dishwalla, Angels and Devils

Yeah you might wanna listen to the track above, just to get some sort of insight if you feel called. I just love the acoustic version so it’s what I linked lol.

But kidding aside, yeah, fighting all the demons really take time, and even though it does suck big time, I’m already at a point that I had to remind myself to use the low vibes to help me heal what needs to be healed, because at this point I can’t do much with the lockdown still going on (I am about to go really, really crazy staying stagnant AF). It’s also frustrating when the entire household is just glued to the news, like THIS ISN’T A TYPHOON WHERE YOU NEED HOURLY UPDATES T_T It’s just frustrating, and everything just went downhill for me when the gateway opened. All of the anger and frustration that had almost eaten me alive for a good chunk of my life all came rushing forward. I haven’t crumbled into a crying heap yet, maybe after I post this lol but despite meditating for heccin long hours, doing more physical activities than the usual (despite the sweltering heat) and still getting no absolution of the frustration, I was really about to give in to lashing out, just to free me from the pain. I had no idea how to transmute these complex emotions (aka they’re all crumpled into one big heap of NOPE) in the fastest and most efficient way possible but I also didn’t want to vent out and trigger anger within the household (me commenting on every death toll count as fear mongering was already too much lol) so I just ended up venting my anger on leveling up in Tetris 99 because GAH I NEED TO GET SOME SORT OF CLARITY ON THINGS. It felt nice, but now each time I close my eyes I only see all of the tetraminos trying to fit snugly into the slots. Still better than getting angry and stuff.

And later will be the Pink Full Moon in Libra, so I guess it’s going to be another strong full moon since it’s the first one after the gateway opened. Since Libra is a sign that wants balance, and makes sure that everything gets balanced by hook or by crook, this is also a great time to reflect on what needs to get balanced in our lives. Because despite being all lovey-dovey and smooth and silky, Libra is still a cardinal sign that can really unleash the beast if there is a strong imbalance of some sort. It’s just a bit more flexible than Capricorn, more level-headed than Cancer, and a lot more forward-thinking than Aries. If you need to know, I have all of these in my natal chart and it’s not exactly a fun party when all the cardinal energies have not yet figured out how to have fun with everyone else.

OK after this line is a personal rant ,you can end the reading here. =)

For me, personally, I really need to balance listening on what others tell me to do, and what information I channel for myself. I guess trying hard to try to fit in by tuning in to the collective like most of the card readers elsewhere dulled my senses and I just felt my oversoul just said HECC IT and cut me out of the general collective altogether. Now I find it hard to tune in to the larger chunk of the collective since the Lion’s Gate of 2019 so I just don’t post anything collective-based in my cartomancy side blog. Now it’s mostly my own personal energetic stuff. The flipside of this is that aside from feeling the general fears and whatnot of the collective unconscious (hence my rant on feelings lol) I still find it a lot more manageable to do readings for other people or events, even thoughI have to unblock a ton just to hear the Divine realms say HI to me. T_T

And that is why standing out instead of fitting in is a strong lesson in balance for me. It sucks but it’s not like I can keep escaping my life path.

Personal ranting ends here lol

I am still feeling a bit woozy even though it’s been a few days after the energetic portal so I won’t be posting an infused photo in this post, but I’ll make a special one once my energies get stabilized again. I hope you all don’t mind.

Oh, and one last thing before I end this post. The huge energetic shifts that happened since the wildfires started in the new year, and other tectonic activities within the ring of fire region are only the beginnings of things that are about to come, so if you’re wishing that things will get back to normal, I am here to tell you that nope, not gonna happen. If anything, this is a time to update all systems and revise time-consuming protocols because honestly, calamities like these will become more common and thus streamlining methods will become more than inevitable. Self-sufficiency up to certain levels will also be even more important, as would be the de-centralization of various services and whatnot in order to bring back the power to the larger members of the populace.

But do not fear, just because the changes are annoying and inconvenient does not mean that things will eventually get suckier. Just imagine the time around the early 20th century when electricity wasn’t even a thing and then all of a sudden transmission lines were being installed in each household. Sure, there’s a risk of fire and getting electrocuted, but look at what time we’re living in now. Can’t even read this post without relying on electrical lines. You can think of it that way.

And so this ends my Full Moon message, for everyone who feels called to this. It’s also somewhat timeless so if you read this in the future and it still resonates, it just means that you were able to receive what you needed to know right now.

Thank you for walking this weird journey with me, see you on the next update, and may you grow into the person you seek.

Mikazuki

PS. If you found the information in this post to be very helpful, insightful, and of great value to you and your own personal journey, please feel free to reblog, share and heart/like, or if you feel super-generous, energetic exchanges are welcomed! Please click here and use this email address: [email protected]

Thank you so much and be blessed!

PSS. If you’re interested to get a personal card and energetic reading, for inquires please send an email or an anonymous ask in this page. Thank you! =)

#full moon in libra 2020 #full moon in libra April 2020 #full moon in libra april 7-8 2020 #post-jupiter conjuct pluto 2020 #4/4/2020 gateway aftermath #jupiter conjunct pluto 2020 #dark night of the soul #also I play tetris now #it's fun #tetris 99 could help me manage my anger #stay tuned #Pink moon 2020 #changes are coming #so let's just get excited I guess

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