‘Abandon taste’: Kodaline’s lesson in loosening up

It’s a freezing afternoon in January in a very chilly Georgian house in rural Co Kildare. One of Ireland’s most successful bands are taking a break from rehearsing for their forthcoming UK and US tour – and a possible gig at Croke Park in the summer – and have gathered close to the fire that’s blazing.

"As soon as we finished In a Perfect World I started worrying about the second one," says Steve Garrigan, the short but improbably good-looking lead singer of Kodaline, his breath visible as he speaks. "I was constantly thinking about it, before and after gigs. New songs were the thing – I suppose I was concerned about what people call the second-album syndrome. When we got around to doing it, however, I'd forgotten that writing songs is what we do. So we got into a studio and we did exactly that. I discovered that it wasn't very difficult after all."

“We shut out how successful the first album had been,” adds Mark Prendergast, Kodaline’s pipe-cleaner-thin lead guitarist. “We were there to just make a record. Our record label didn’t put us under pressure or anything like that. They just left us to it; they let us pick the songs, and they let us record it how we wanted to.”

Rewind to the scorching June of 2014. In Topanga Canyon, a rocky, picturesque area overlooking Malibu, in California, is a recording studio owned and operated by Garret Lee, the Dubliner also known as Jacknife Lee, producer to the likes of Taylor Swift, U2, REM, One Direction, Snow Patrol, Weezer and Crystal Castles. In the studio’s main room is a neon sign with two words: “Abandon taste.”

It is here last year that Kodaline got their collective ass kicked. They arrived with a handful of new songs; they were hot off the trail of commercial success with their debut album; and they were tiring of playing the same set. In all likelihood they were tired of being Kodaline, the band fessed up to Lee.

The consensus was that although they didn't necessarily want to lose the elements that made them so popular in the first place (even if Q magazine bestowed on the debut album a one-star rating, and DIY magazine opined, "let's be frank here – what this band needs is a punch in the face"), they also wanted to remove their sound from the comfort zone it so woozily languished in.

Cue a sequence of lessons from Lee, a producer who demands that musicians trust their instincts, loosen up, have fun and, most important of all, take risks.

Lee gave Kodaline an unorthodox approach to capturing a sonic atmosphere. Nine months later that second album, Coming Up for Air – a telling title, of course – may not be Kodaline's Kid A, but there's no doubt that Lee has put some hair on the chest of a band that was used to being on the receiving end of a certain brand of hate criticism.

Home from home

Back to rural Kildare and the freezing Georgian house. Glen Hansard, Damien Rice and Kíla have stayed here – it has its own studios, and is a casual home from home for many Irish musicians who wish to tease out material away from the temptations of city life – and the Kodaline lads are on the final day of rehearsals before heading out for the UK tour.

All four members of the band – Garrigan, Prendergast, drummer Vinny May and bassist Jay Boland – sit in on the interview, something that rarely benefits coherent threads of conversation, but does lend a camaraderie to the discussion.

Garrigan, despite a certain vagueness (part boyish, part infuriating), is focused enough to set the scene. Second albums are almost always borne out of frustration at wanting to say something new, so was a level of boredom setting in with playing the same songs at every gig?

“It did get to a point where we knew exactly what would happen, even to the point of Jay tuning his bass,” he says. “Every little detail was so honed, but with a new batch of songs we’re now going to have to start thinking again.”

“It’s not boring, as such,” Prendergast says, “because playing live is so exciting. New songs reinvigorate the set, and playing new songs alongside songs you’re very familiar with makes the older material fresher. You’re also more nervous on stage for a while, because you’re seeing what the reaction is like.”

Are shows ever scripted? With plenty of bands, we’ve heard the same anecdote told between the same songs several nights in a row. “A lot of it is muscle memory,” says Garrigan. “It’s more that, subconsciously, we know what we’re doing, because we’ve done it so many times. But I don’t like the word ‘scripted’. I’m not much of a talker on stage, to be honest, but ironically sometimes I have to talk to about 14,000 people. Of course you might sometimes say the same thing, but whenever and wherever possible I try not to do that. That said, with gig after gig, you know you have similar things that you can say to fall back on. But, no, we don’t script.”

“You become better at it, don’t you?” May says. “It becomes smoother.”

Guitar shredding

Which is somewhat ironic, as while no one could mistake Kodaline for Nirvana, the sound on Coming Up for Air is grittier and tougher. Sonic storms blow, guitars shred. All members admit that when they started, the band had little overall creative direction; songs that would go on to become daytime-radio favourites were being formed, but they didn't really have a masterplan.

“We still don’t,” says Prendergast. “On the first album there were songs we’d written over the course of about five years, and we were figuring out what we wanted to sound like. There was always this thing within the band that we hadn’t got a distinct sound. We still feel like that, and in that sense it remains exciting for us.”

A chill blows through the room. Someone puts another log on the fire, which crackles back to life – unlike the conversation, which dwindles. It’s a long way from Topanga Canyon, but it seems that the lessons learned there are sticking hard and fast.

“Sonically, for this album we just knew we wanted to be bigger, to incorporate more,” says Boland. “We have a wider range now, dynamically, and we know better when to pull back and when to thrust forward. More importantly, though, we know you have to believe in yourself from the very beginning, because not many do.”

New lease of life: Steve Garrigan on Jacknife Lee
"We got the opportunity to work with him and we jumped at it. At the time we weren't thinking about a record, so we went over to his studio in Topanga Canyon last June and recorded two songs with him. But very quickly he opened up our eyes and minds to different sounds, a different way at looking at writing music. It inspired us. We then went off and did a studio session with our old producers, Steve Harris and Phil Magee – you could say we went back to what we were used to – but this time we were expanding it thanks to Jacknife. He made us realise that anything is possible. We left America in that frame of mind. It was a new lease of life. We were quite scared, because we'd never worked with a different producer before, and, you know, Jacknife is a big one – the Grammies, U2, REM, Taylor Swift, Snow Patrol, One Direction and so on. It was intimidating but awesome."

Coming Up for Air is out on Sony Music on Friday