Along the way, they toured with U2, Take That and Paul McCartney, sailed through the second album syndrome that sinks so many bands, played to a 55 000-strong crowd at an historic hometown show in Dublin, amassed almost four million followers on Facebook and 1.5 million on Twitter and saw their singer star on TV talent show The Voice. In short, the past four years have seen The Script become one of the biggest, best-loved bands in the world.
Like The Script’s meticulously-crafted, meaningful songs, there is more to the seemingly obvious album title than first meets the eye. #3 is their third album. But it’s also the power of three – three people, three equals, whose combined input is what makes The Script special. It was written and recorded in Studio 3 at Battersea’s Sphere Studios, home to the band and their equipment for the first six months of this year. And #3 sums up the theme of the album – ‘music for the head, heart and feet’ was a mantra The Script stuck to from the moment they opened the Pandora’s Box of ideas – aka the self-built mobile studio they took on tour last year – to the day they handed #3, two months early, to their record label.
“There’s a synergy to three,” says singer Danny O’Donoghue. “If you delve in to it – which we tend to do with everything – it’s a lucky number, in the past a religious number. But the title is mostly about us. As any geek fan of the band could tell you, we’re all extremely different people, but magic happens when you mix us together. Well, magic or a car crash, which is how we describe the songs we scrap.”
#3 should have been The Script’s most difficult album to make. After their eponymously-titled debut topped the British and Irish charts in 2008 and sold more than two million copies worldwide, its successor, 2010’s Science & Faith, sent The Script supernova. In the States, it entered the charts at number three, spawned a huge radio hit inFor The First Time and saw the band move up to arenas. In South Africa, they found themselves playing to crowds of 18 000; tours of Australia were extended across Asia. As guitarist Mark Sheehan says, “Success was ours to lose”.
Dublin’s finest – Danny O’Donoghue, Mark Sheehan and Glen Power – step up to the podium with their Olympic sized new single Fine-tuned, buffed up and tough talking,Hall of Fame sees the band return to write a new, uplifting piano-led Script, with new pal will.i.am on board for lyrical twists and turns.
Immediately obvious was that #3 would see a return to the rhythmic, hip-hop and R&B-influenced sound of their debut. But it had to be organic, to rely on real instruments, rather than the synthesised sounds so prevalent in today’s pop. The Script looked to the live hip-hop bands they loved growing up, such as A Tribe Called Quest, for inspiration.
As ever, O'Donoghue and Sheehan struggled with the lyrics, staring them down and mixing them round – Sheehan likens the process to completing a Rubik’s Cube – until they conveyed the exact emotions they had in mind.
The trio agree that, lyrically, #3 is by far their best album to date – more personal, more emotional and much more optimistic. The message – music for the head, heart and feet – is self-belief, soldiering on and achieving your dreams.
Source: Media update
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