Snow Patrol

One of the biggest bands ever to emerge from Northern Ireland, Snow Patrol was actually formed at the University of Dundee in Scotland, where founders Gary Lightbody, Michael Morrison (replaced early on drums by Jimmy Quinn) and Mark McClelland were all students.  After changing their name from Polar Bear and building a following through university gigs, the band settled in Glasgow, signed with the indie Jeepster label, and released two largely overlooked albums.  After getting dropped by their first label, the band did some serious woodshedding in 2002-03, adding lead guitarist Nathan Connolly, signing with the Fiction label, and teaming with star producer Jackknife Lee (who would remain on all subsequent albums).  Adopting a bigger and heavier sound, the band had an international hit with its ironically titled third album, Final Straw.  Their first round of high-profile touring followed, including a string of opening dates for U2, and the album hit #3 in the UK while scraping into the low levels of the US album chart. The move to a heavier sound continued on 2006's Eyes Open, and epic ballads became a band trademark. During the sessions Scottish bassist Paul Wilson replaced McClelland and Tom Simpson was added as keyboardist, staying through 2013. The album spawned their biggest single, "Chasing Cars," which ultimately became the most-played U.K. song of the 2000s; in America it got a Best Rock Song Grammy nomination but lost to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The next album, A Hundred Million Suns was begun less than a year later; and the band continued with high-profile opening slots including Coldplay, Oasis and again U2. In America Snow Patrol songs also became a fixture on the prime-time soap "Grey's Anatomy" (ABC 2005- ), cementing their reputation for emotive and romantically-themed songs. 2011's Fallen Empires marked a shakeup in their formula, flirting with techno and adding songwriter Johnny McDaid as a fulltime band member (though Lightbody remained Snow Patrol's main writer, with McDaid contributing to only one track). This would be the last Snow Patrol album for seven years, with Lightbody blaming some of the delay on writer's block; he scrapped an album's worth of songs in this era.. Early in the break Lightbody sang a duet with Taylor Swift on "The Last Time," which became the final and least successful single from her Red album.  While he remained a Snow Patrol member, McDaid's songwriting career took off with tracks by Shawn Mendes, James Blunt and Ed Sheeran. He also became a tabloid fixture thanks to his stormy romance with Courteney Cox. Snow Patrol reappeared at the start of summer 2018 with their seventh album Wildness, its songs inspired by Lightbody's getting sober and witnessing his father struggle with dementia. The album continued their run of UK success, hitting the charts at #2.