Taking in his love of songwriters, singing and listening to a song over 10,000 times, Danny O'Donoghue talks Ed Nash through the pivotal songs in his life.
Danny O'Donoghue loves the word ‘beautiful’. So much so in fact, that he says it over twenty times whilst we talk about his favourite songs.
When we speak on a boiling day in London, O'Donoghue is in a rehearsal studio gearing up for The Script’s upcoming tour. I mention how hot it is in my flat and he tells me, “It's literally the polar opposite here, the north polar opposite. I left the cooler on all night so it’s freezing in here. I walked in this morning, and I was like, ‘This is gorgeous’”.
The Irish musician is an engaging, very funny and open interviewee, who also does a mean Bob Dylan impersonation. O'Donoghue’s chipperness is admirable in light of the tragedy the band faced last year, when Mark Sheehan, his childhood friend and co-founder of The Script, passed away. When I ask how he’s feeling about it, it’s the only time in our conversation that his ebullience drops slightly.
“It's up and down. I’m dealing with it professionally – somebody's not here – but also personally, somebody's not here too. It’s just trying to get through that, and the hard part is living through it in real time in front of everybody”, he says.
“I'm always going to be asked about it and you have to be good with talking about it. I find it cathartic to talk about it and him in our music, because I'm so proud of it. Like anybody who's lost somebody, you have good days and bad days.”
I tell O'Donoghue that my Dad, who was from Limerick, passed a couple of years ago, and there are waves of feelings that come over you in the aftermath, often when you least expect them to. “As your Dad’s Irish, then you know what it's like, Irish people prefer to celebrate a life rather than grieve the loss.”
O'Donoghue finds solace in listening to music as a coping mechanism and how it can tell a story of time passing, citing Lukas Graham’s “7 Years” as a perfect example. “It’s this whole story and each verse talks about a different part of his life. The power of music is amazing.”
Their new record, Satellites, their first since 2019’s Sunsets & Full Moons, will see The Script heading out on a huge tour, where O'Donoghue and drummer Glen Power will be joined by new band members Benjamin Sargent and Ben Weaver, and he views this point in their career as a chance to start afresh.
“It feels like it's back to basics, back to what we love doing, which is recording for a year and then heading out for as long as we can, or right until the wheels come off as they say!”
Of his Nine Songs selections, O'Donoghue reflects that “if you asked me tomorrow, there'd be nine other songs, it’s about whatever the day is.” Listening to the passion with which he speaks about each of them, and the impact they’ve all had on his own artistic journey however, I’m not so sure if they would be different. When he analyses his choices as our conversation ends, he picks out a thread between each of them.
“The funny thing is, if you listen to each of these songs, you'll hear something I've tried to do on one of our records” he explains. “With “I’m Yours” on The Script I thought I was writing a James Taylor song. You make your own sound by trying to emulate your heroes but doing it wrong, so you end up with your version of it. Except for Bob Dylan and Don McClean. All I ever want to do is write something that compares to those two, and every time I try, it bounces off the wall!”
Whilst the question if O'Donoghue’s choices would be different on another day is moot, what is indisputable is his infectious love of music, and his ongoing mission to try and understand what makes it so important.
“What I always find crazy about music is that you don't need to understand how it works, or the complexity of it, for it to go into your brain. It's like the grooves on the records are already there for you to comprehend whatever music is going to throw at you musically, melodically, or harmonically - all of those pathways are there for you. There’s so much about music that's unquantifiable…”
And of course, he finishes the sentence with his favourite word. “…It’s beautiful.”
“Fire and Rain” by James Taylor
DANNY O'DONOGHUE: My family were musicians, and they loved the singer/songwriters. My dad was a piano player and he repurposed hit songs into a piano set, he loved Neil Diamond, Roy Orbison, Floyd Kramer and all the Elvis stuff.
I think I first heard this song when I was six or seven. My sister Andrea was a big fan of his, so I’d have heard “Copperline” and New Moon Shine pretty early on. I loved “Fire and Rain” because it was the first time that I'd ever heard an acoustic singer/songwriter, and I loved his voice and his lyrics. I was just getting into music, and this was the first time that I'd found out there are stories behind songs, like, ‘What's the reason for the song?’
It’s about a friend of his who passed away due to heroin, and I found out they both dabbled in drugs. The lines “Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you / I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song / I just can't remember who to send it to” are a beautiful way to remember someone.
I'm not sure whether they were lovers, but they were definitely very, very close. It's such a beautiful lyric, and the thing about a beautiful lyric is it stands the test of time. “Fire and Rain” is a juxtaposition, it's beautiful.
Then there’s the clinching line at the end of the chorus, “But I always thought that I'd see you again”, with this stark knowledge that he won't ever see her again. It got to me so much that I physically picked up a guitar because I wanted to get inside that song, to find out how it works and what was going on with it.
I then realised that with James Taylor, whilst what he’s doing sounds simple, but it bloody well isn’t! He’s a fingerpicking genius. And I'm still trying to learn that song.
BEST FIT: I read that his friends kept her passing a secret for him for six months, because he was writing an album that was being released by The Beatles’ Apple Records, and they didn’t want him to lose focus.
What a horrible thing to have to go through, you know? And I understand why, but also, you’ve got to tell people in real time, because otherwise you don't trust the people who didn't tell you. They're essentially not there anymore, so it's really tough.
I love the story behind it, it gets me every time I hear the story behind the song, it brings more gravity to the song.
“Take on Me” by a-ha
DANNY O'DONOGHUE: As much as I'd like to say it was a Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen record, the very first record I gravitated towards and wanted to spend money on was by a-ha.
I was just coming online as far as watching TV and listening to music, realising I didn't need to wait for the TV to come on to listen to music, I could actually go and buy something I really liked, and I would play, sing and dance in my room to it.
With the first pocket money I ever got, I went to Abbey Discs in town and my Dad said, ‘What do you want to buy?’ I went straight over to buy “Take on Me”. I used to sing along to the Beatles and “Take on Me”, and I remember that song being really fun.
I liked the look of the singer; he had an Elvis vibe. People have told me since that The Script aren't unlike a-ha, there’s three of us in the band and we play pop / alternative music. And maybe I’m not unlike Morten Harket, I’ve got the hair, the leather jacket and the cheekbones!
It's funny, because looking back, at the time a-ha were seen as super poppy, but now it’s like they were way ahead of their time. I think a lot of people are re-evaluating them. Harry Styles’ “As It Was” is very down that line, The Weeknd has a tune that’s not a rip off, but it's very much in that mold. It just goes to show you that sound of the ‘80s has been around for a long time and will be around for a long time.
BEST FIT: The video took six months to make and was the fifth song to reach over 1 billion views on YouTube.
It's genius. I think Coldplay do the same thing, funnily enough. We don't do it in our videos, and I don't know why. If you're trying to get a younger audience, having something like a Coldplay video where they're all apes running through the jungle, it's a beautiful thing.
You can feel like, ‘I just want to sing to my own generation’, but if you want a younger demographic to get involved in your music - they don't care about you, they're not trying to date you or marry you - what they would love to be is a cartoon.
The video really played on my imagination as a kid. I was interested in music, but I was also interested in being a cartoon. If they asked, ‘Who wants to be a rock star?’, I’d say ‘Me!’ If they asked, ‘Who wants to be a Thunderbird?’ ‘Me!’
I wanted to be on screen, and this video had a lot to do with it. I used to dream about being in that video and having cartoon dreams, chasing that girl. I think I came online and in more ways that I knew at the time!
“Water Runs Dry” by Boyz II Men
BEST FIT: You wrote some songs with Boyz II Men when you were a teenager.
DANNY O'DONOGHUE: I was 16 or 17. I was in a band, this was before The Script, and we got the opportunity to work with them in a place called Stone Creek in Conshohocken in Philadelphia. We worked with Wanyá and Shawn Stockman from Boyz II Men, we wrote two songs with them and one of them ended up getting released. It was the very first song I ever wrote, it was a song called “The Day.”
I grew up being absolutely bowled over by voices. I loved technically gifted singers who could go down through the scales, and around that time there was probably nobody better than them at delivering a song. They were some of the most amazingly gifted vocalists ever.
It was everything to do with Boyz II Men. Babyface, who was a brilliant writer and producer in his own right, wrote for them and produced them. It was also the environment that they grew up in, there was them, Babyface, Brian McKnight, a band called Az Yet and Blackstreet.
There was this movement going on that was like barbershop on steroids, where the harmonies were just as complex as any Chopin piece or any classical piece I'd ever heard, with the way the chords dropped, the soprano dropped down and then the bass. It was really mathematical, and I thought, ‘These are not your average everyday singers’. The arrangements were really sophisticated. I absolutely adore them.
What is it about this song in particular that you love so much?
“Water Runs Dry” is a song I’ve probably listened to – and am still listening to – about 10,000 times. It's such a brilliant piece of music. It was written by Babyface, and the harmonies are incredible. They did a cover of “Yesterday” by The Beatles on the album and it was equally as beautifully arranged as a four-part harmony vocal group. You should hear it, it's phenomenal.
I adore vocals, I adore choirs, I love going to church and I love singing. So if there’s anything that's two people harmonising and running and riffing, I'm all over it. I absolutely love it.
“Paranoid Android” by Radiohead
DANNY O'DONOGHUE: I come from a family of six kids, so there were five others besides me, and every music genre was already taken by them.
Pop was taken by my sister, heavy metal was my brother Dara and Ian was into Deep Purple and Jim Morrison. But I was exposed to a lot of different sounds on a day-to-day basis, I grew up with great songs from each genre and if something stuck out in that genre then I was like, ‘I’m quids in’.
With “Paranoid Android”, my brother got into the story of the song and how it was written. They all had different pieces of music and said, ‘We'll go to three separate rooms, we'll come up with three separate pieces of music and over the course of the day we’ll see if one piece is good enough, or if we can mix them together.’
When I write songs, I like to be in the room while other people are creating so I can be involved in their creation, so I know how crap I would be at doing that, but they did it and what you get is this absolute out and out masterpiece. You can hear the segments and who did what part, sonically it's beautiful, melodically it's incredible, and the fact that they mixed those three genres into one song so effortlessly was beautiful.
BEST FIT: The first version was 14 minutes long, with a Hammond organ coda and they decided to cut it to just over 6 minutes. It had a distinctly non-mainstream cartoon video, directed by Magnus Carlsson, as they were obsessed with his animated TV sitcom Robin.
Again, there you go, they got the kids involved! You knew the highbrow music critics would be listening to the music and saying how avant-garde it was, but the kids are saying, ‘This is fucking dope, this is really cool.’
Radiohead are always going against the grain. If everyone's doing three minute songs, then they’re going to do long songs. If everyone’s going to Tenerife they're going to Eleven-erife, because they're always trying to do one more thing than everyone else.
“A Day in the Life” by The Beatles
DANNY O'DONOGHUE: The reason I chose “A Day in the Life” is for similar reasons to “Paranoid Android”, because they did everything in that song. Besides the fact that The Beatles wrote amazing tunes, they did everything first. They were the first ones to change time signatures, to bring in an orchestra, to have all these different genres in one, to do concept albums. There's nothing they didn't do in the short amount of time that they were together.
With the song itself, I was a kid, and I'm not going to tell you how old I was, but I was smoking my first joint, and I remember being in my mate’s bedroom. We turned off the lights and listened to the album Sgt. Pepper's from top to bottom, but it was this particular part of it, because it's all sewn together, that was most impressionable to me at that point.
I loved the lyrics. I loved how ordinary it was, but how extraordinary The Beatles were with their lyrics, they were brilliant, but their songs were about ordinary people. That's the most phenomenal thing about it, they were so accessible to the working class and so accessible to me, even though I was a kid from Dublin.
I’d see a lot of myself in those songs, (sings) “Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head / Found my way upstairs and had a smoke and somebody spoke, and I went into a dream”, that was my morning going to school! He was probably writing about being middle aged, doing whatever, but it just spoke to me, and I loved that. And the anticipation of it, the music is swirling around and around, and it's beautiful and very inspiring to listen to as a kid.
BEST FIT: I’ve always loved that big piano chord at the end, which they played on three pianos and a harmonium.
Maybe Apple took that, when you turn on your Apple Mac it has a similar sound. The Beatles let it be known that they got screwed over by the bite being in the Apple logo and there was that big thing with Steve Jobs, that they basically ripped off The Beatles.
“The Times They Are A-Changin'” by Bob Dylan
DANNY O'DONOGHUE: I was in America, I was flat broke and I was looking for inspiration from different artists. I got a few artists live DVD’s, to see what they were doing to get more of an insight into them, and I came across the documentary Don’t Look Back. I watched it and saw the force of nature that guy was in that period, smoking a million cigarettes, with his eagle eyes watching the world go by, and how unrelenting and unforgiving he was.
There’s a great interview in it he had with Time Magazine, and he said something like, ‘I don't give a shit about a Time Magazine, none of my fans read Time Magazine. I'm the fucking the working-class hero, we don't buy your shit’. It was, ‘Wow, you’re ballsy as hell’, because he can just turn on you. I think he got it right. He wasn't trying to fit the way he was into Time Magazine, to get the high-brows to like him.
He was like ‘Fuck you, I don't care what you think of me, it doesn't matter.’ When he was asked about the meanings behind his songs he’d say, (in a Bob Dylan voice), ‘I don't know man. It's just a song, listen to it and if you get it, you get it, if you don't, sorry.’ That documentary is beautiful, there’s also a part where he’s sitting in a hotel room with Donovan, and Donovan's shitting his pants.
BEST FIT: Donovan plays him “To Sing for You” and looked totally unnerved by Bob Dylan sitting there, who replies by blowing him out of the water with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”
Yes, Dylan takes the guitar as if to say, ‘That's my crown bro, and you're not going to fucking fight me for it.’ It was a beautiful documentary, and it got me massively behind him as an artist as well.
"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" is another one I love, but “The Times They Are A-Changin'”, lyrically, hands down, from top to bottom, just take the Nobel Prize for Literature, because if anybody writes a better song than that, then good luck, you deserve a prize.
Lyrically, that’s one of the best songs ever written, you listen to the lyrics, how much they mean to the world and how on the nail he is. If that song was never released and I recorded it, it would still be relevant today. You know why? Because every lyric in it means the same as it did back then. It's funny, because it's called ‘The Times Are A-Changin’, but how amazing is it that they’re not really any different to when he was growing up?
“Vincent” by Don McLean
DANNY O'DONOGHUE: For me, both “The Times They Are A-Changin'” and “Vincent”, depending on my mood and my day, are the juxtaposition of what I would play at my funeral. I think it’s probably more likely to be “Vincent”, because it talks about the condition of being an artist, about what it takes, where you have to go, and how I believe artistry couples with mental illness and madness – ‘Am I wrong or am I right?’
BEST FIT: Don McLean was inspired to write it after reading a Van Gogh biography, and said, “I knew I had to write a song arguing that he wasn't crazy. He had an illness and so did his brother Theo. This makes it different, in my mind, to the garden variety of 'crazy'.”
It's such a beautiful song, and it plays to a lot of the stuff in my life that I believe in, like the best ones go too soon and they often go misunderstood. People are never really celebrated until after they're gone, and probably nobody more so than Van Gogh. To die relatively poor and unknown is quite a shocking thing for somebody that left such a mark on the world afterwards.
With my own father, I wouldn't say he trained me to be where I am today, but he was a massive influence on me. He was always giving me advice the whole way through, and then he passed away four months before our first single got released.
It was my dream to do this, but it was our dream together almost, because like him, I loved music so much. So it really plays into that, I certainly feel that some people don't get the justification for what they put into this life. It's maybe when you're gone that people recognise that.
That’s why the lyric means so much to me, with every twist and turn it's just so beautifully written, it doesn't let up from top to bottom, it's incredible. You can quote any part of that song and I'd still be, ‘Who wrote that lyric?’ It’s unbelievable, lyrically and melodically, that song is so beautiful.
It’s the same with “The Times They Are A-Changin'”. Both of them were inspiring and having somebody like them active in the marketplace – a rising tide raises all ships. The folk scene was beautiful then, but everything seems to be homogenized now, it all has to fit in a box.
Back then it was about ideas and personal truths, it was such a great time for music, and I really miss that time.
“Fields of Gold” by Sting
DANNY O'DONOGHUE: I'm a huge admirer of Sting, particularly his voice, I just love it, it has this worldly tone that has a hard-won wisdom in it. And I absolutely love that song, It's a gorgeous piece of music and the production is as beautiful as his voice.
The imagery of it is akin to Gladiator, where he’s literally walking through the fields, he has corn in his hand and he's walking to where his wife is, where his home is, where he resides as a human, his source. And that's a visual representation of how I feel when I listen to that song – “Upon the fields of barley / You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky / As we walk in fields of gold”.
It feels beautiful. It's like a hug of a song when you listen to it. I get emotional about that song, but I also think about my future wife, I think about my future kids. It encompasses a beautiful memory that I’ve yet to have, which sounds crazy to say that, but that song is just exceptional.
I follow him on Instagram and stuff and he's still banging them out. He's still up there looking fucking better than I am, his arms are in better shape than mine.
BEST FIT: Well, he does do a lot of Tantric yoga.
I'm a big believer in whatever he's doing, let me do the same thing! I don't know if it’ll have the same effect. You could put his bass in my hands, and you’re still going to get a shit bassline. (laughs)
Another song I didn't put on here is by someone who has an equally impressive voice. Do you remember Colin Hay from Men at Work? He's got a song called “Beautiful World”, he did an acoustic album called Man @ Work, which is a solo record of some of his songs, and I’d put his voice up there with Sting’s for presence and girth. It’s such a full bodied, storytelling singing voice, and with everything he sings, even if it's a lie, I'm going believe it, because I'm just ‘Wow!’
“Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley
BEST FIT: Jeff Buckley was a ridiculously good-looking human being, with a ridiculously good voice.
DANNY O'DONOGHUE: Yes, and singing a ridiculously, incredibly amazing song, that every songwriter wishes they’d written. Because it's all there as it goes – “the minor fall and the major lift” – it talks exquisitely about where it's about to go, but you still don’t believe it's going to go there, and it fucking does with his delivery.
It’s one of those songs that’s been passed on from artist to artist. Leonard Cohen wrote it in 1984, John Cale covered it in 1991 and then Jeff Buckley covered it in 1994. There’s also the story of his relationship with his Dad, the musician Tim Buckley, who Jeff Buckley only met once when he was eight years old.
Really? I didn't know that.
His Dad’s most famous song is “Song to the Siren”, I think you’d like it.
Wow, that’s cool. Going back to then, there wasn't that much AI, auto-tune or anything like that. It's a flawless performance from a guy that went too soon. He's such a powerhouse of a performer and guitar player, and maybe that's the consistency between all of the songs I’ve picked.
Lyrically it just builds itself. It's like “Stairway to Heaven”, it builds itself again and again, all the way through the chords. If you write music, you’ll understand that what he's doing as he’s going up the chords, it's just so beautiful. And then the point is the Hallelujah at the very end. I'm a Christian, so Hallelujah moments are a part of my life, looking for them or striving towards them.
It's a perfect, perfect song. If you were going to teach someone a song, that would be one of them.
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