Good songwriters don’t necessarily write good books, but Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody’s lyricism works just as beautifully on the page as it does in his music. If you’re looking for a memoir about the process of creating an album, which also dives into the raw, human themes behind the music, then this book is for you. (And it is very good.)
The Forest Is the Path, Snow Patrol’s eighth studio album, was released in 2024, following the departure of two band members the year before. Now Gary Lightbody has published his debut book of the same name. Part-memoir, part-companion piece to the album, The Forest Is the Path (the book) is a tender exploration of grief, music-making and the complications of love.
In 2019, Lightbody lost his father, Jack, to dementia, and for a year after his death Lightbody felt unable to grieve. In the memoir sections of the book, he unpacks his complex relationship with his father and the failings he identified in himself during that period of numbness. The portrait he draws of his dad – the living, breathing man, and what he stood for in young Gary’s life – is vivid and heartfelt. Lightbody also reveals what eventually unlocked his grief and allowed him to overcome his creative paralysis to write some of the songs that appear on the album.
The book also digs into the process of creating and recording The Forest Is the Path (the album) with fellow band members Nathan Connolly and Johnny McDaid, and producer Fraser T. Smith. Individual chapters are dedicated to the album’s key themes – time, home, love, death and life – which Lightbody explores with a philosopher’s eye and a poet’s touch. My copy of The Forest Is the Path is filled with highlights; every chapter is sprinkled with gorgeous turns of phrase that could be song lyrics themselves.
Given its subject matter, the book is a tough read (content warnings for death, grief and parental loss), but sadness transmuted into art is something Snow Patrol fans will be familiar with. The book also contains a striking amount of humour – sometimes dark, sometimes less so – which provides essential light and shade when reading about such heavy topics. Lightbody might break your heart, but he’ll patch it up again a few pages later.
Of course, the best way to read The Forest Is the Path is alongside the album. (I personally read the book first, then listened to the whole album during a particularly melancholic bathtime.) Woven through with the same themes, and born from the same events, both book and album will give you a lump in your throat and an ache in your chest. It might be cliché to say, ‘You’ll laugh, you’ll cry,’ but in this case it happens to be true. You will. I did.
The Forest is the Path is out now via HarperNonFiction
Review by Clare Diston
