Danny O’Reilly from the Coronas: ‘It took me a couple of albums to realise that I might not always be right’

Eventually, life in the Upside Down world is shifting back to normal, and for Dublin band The Coronas it couldn’t have arrived any sooner. The band’s 2020 album, True Love Waits, was released a few months after Covid-19 hit the world like billiard balls in a sock, and because of social distancing restrictions, there were no tour dates to plug it. When you tour an album, says lead singer Danny O’Reilly, “you eventually get drawn back into writing new songs again, so I started writing them with no real plan in mind for a full album. Last summer, however, we sat down, listened to all of the demos, and the feeling was that the material was very strong, so we fleshed them out and finished them off.”

The result is the band’s seventh studio album, Time Stopped, which brims over with assured if contemplative pop songs. O’Reilly was reluctant to write thematically about the pandemic (“what kind of insights about such a weird and all-consuming thing could I offer?”), but on reflection thought it would seem wrong to completely ignore it. “What I ended up doing was to write from a personal perspective within the frame of the lockdowns, and to reference the pandemic in a personal way.” He admits that such an approach was triggered by the pandemic, causing him to be somewhat more introspective.

“I also spent more time on the lyrics. On the earlier albums, I’d write a song in a day. If I went back to it later I’d be of the mindset that it was written because of the way I was feeling on that day and just go on to the next song.” Coming up with the new songs, he says, forced him to look closer and be slightly fussier. “I was more comfortable in my skin with that approach, and also writing with other people we know very well helped – I was certainly more open to that.

“I had started to do a bit of that with True Love Waits rather than take on the songwriting duties all by myself. I think seven albums in that approach has given us a new lease of life. It took me a couple of albums to realise that I might not always be right, that I might be able to make a song better. That said, I look back at myself in my early 20s and see a confident songwriter. There is a charm and benefit to that because oftentimes as you get older you can be almost too self-critical and overthink things, but I have become better at judging things and trying to find the balance of taking on board the opinions of other people.”

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These things take time, O’Reilly accepts, acknowledging that The Coronas released their debut album, Heroes or Ghosts, in 2007, and that since then they have developed from hopefuls to extremely well-known. “We started playing music together when we were at school, but I look at the lifespan of The Coronas as having started in 2006, a year before we released the debut album.”

It isn’t easy to keep a band together, and with the new album you get a sense of things at the gigs we’ve done that we’re at the start of a new chapter

That is the time, he says, when the band started to take things more seriously. The musicians even went so far as to take a year out of college “to see what might happen”. With college now a distant memory, the longer The Coronas are around, says O’Reilly, the prouder he is of the band’s longevity. “It isn’t easy to keep a band together, and with the new album you get a sense of things at the gigs we’ve done that we’re at the start of a new chapter.”

What are you looking forward to most this Christmas?

“We are currently on the road in Europe, US, and then Australia, and we arrive back in Ireland the second week of December. I’m looking forward to coming home and spending time with the family because that’s always the thing for us. If I get the invite, fingers crossed, I’ll be at home in my mam’s house having Christmas dinner.”

What is your ideal 2022 Christmas present?

“I’m not sure because I’m lucky in that I don’t feel I need a lot. That said, I have been working on a little home studio, so I’m slowly starting to get more equipment into it. Maybe there’ll be a keyboard under the tree, or something for the studio that I might even buy for myself.”

When it comes to Christmas presents, are you a big spender or do you take a more pragmatic approach to buying them?

“I tend to overspend a little bit. With my brother and my sister, we have a deal where we say we’ll spend €50 on each other, but sometimes I might freak out and buy a voucher for €100. Or else I’ll buy something small that costs a little bit extra so that the person the gift is for knows I’ve spent €55 instead of €50! I leave it to the last minute and then buy a load of things, one of which might be a present that the person I’m buying it for will like.”

The Coronas’ gigs in December

• Wednesday, December 14th – Sunday, December 18th, 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin
• Wednesday, December 28th, INEC, Killarney, County Kerry
• The Coronas play Fairview Park, Dublin, June 17th, 2023