By Jim Barber
There are a lot of cliches and stereotypes about Ireland. But there is truth to those that refer to the artistry, poetic literateness, and beauty of the Irish people’s reverence for the sung, spoken and written word, the respect and cultural cache they give to storytellers, the importance of music and art in their daily lives, and for the passion in which their artists, actors, poets, playwrights and musicians conduct their creative endeavors.
So, it should come as little surprise that veteran Irish band, The Coronas, has built a reputation over the past two decades for creating music that is sincere, heartfelt, engaging, compelling and, when experienced especially in a live setting, utterly unforgettable.
The band, which is centered on the founding trio of vocalist/songwriter/guitarist Danny O’Reilly, bassist/guitarist Graham ‘Knoxie’ Knox and drummer Conor Egan, just landed in North America for a tour that will see them play two dates in Canada. The first show is this Friday, July 11, when they hit the stage at The Vogue Theatre in Vancouver, with their return to the Great White North happening on Sunday, July 20, at The Opera House in Toronto. The tour also takes them to San Diego, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Paul, Minnesota, before returning to Northern Ireland for a show in Belfast on Aug. 10.
If you’re uninitiated to the style and sound created by The Coronas, it might be best to think of a similar vibe to that of Coldplay, with a little bit of Canada’s Our Lady Peace thrown in, especially in frontman O’Reilly’s passionate, sometimes plaintive singing voice, which is reminiscent of OLP’s Raine Maida.
“Most of the time, I say we’re indie, we’re rock, we’re melodic. We write honest songs and melodies. I always find that it’s good when you reference bands and we just reference some of our influences. Sometimes I joke and I say, ‘so you like The Beatles? We’re just like them.’ That’s always good for a giggle. I’ve also referenced bands like Snow Patrol, The National, and Coldplay – bands that I still listen to and that still inspire me. Other people might say we sound nothing like those bands. It’s very much a subjective thing and it’s a tough one to answer when asked. If I were pushed, I would say we’re indie rock. We’re, I suppose, anthemic, definitely melodic, and we encourage people come to our shows and sing along and have a good time,” O’Reilly said.
“It’s a fun time. People have asked me recently about the fact that there’s a lot of politics and different things going on in the world, and I always say that our music is an escape from all of that. We don’t write about social issues and culture and maybe it’s because I’m too scared to write about that stuff. But that’s okay, I think, because we are an escape from everyone’s problems. We’re just a good time, and I’d like to think we put on a really good live show and pride ourselves on being a live band. And even if our music isn’t to your taste or whatever, I think if you come and see us live, you’ll appreciate it and say, ‘yeah, those guys are good at what they do.’”
O’Reilly, Egan and Knox are the core three who have been through all the ups and downs of the band since their earliest days at Dublin’s Terenure College, where they all met. Since then, it’s been about this brotherhood of creativity and artistry navigating the slings and arrows of outrageous and fickle fortunes to build a career that has is not only successful by any metric, but sustainable and creatively rewarding.
“One thing that stands out when I look back is we started really young. Our first album [Heroes or Ghosts in 2007] we recorded it when we were 20. We hadn’t even toured outside Dublin, never mind outside Ireland. So, we really learned on the fly. Our first couple of albums we were finding our feet and we were finding what it’s like to be in a band. And we realized we had some songs that were connecting with people. That first album did really well here, but we were still learning and I suppose we’re still learning now. But I think that was the key for us. If we had waited a couple of years and really got everything, all our ducks in a row, then maybe we might have been a little bit more successful at the start. But we were learning, and literally went from album to album, and as we kept going, our audience grew with us and I think that’s key. When we started we were students and we were playing to student crowds. And as we grew up, they grew with us. Over the years our demographic has got wider. Just last weekend we played this festival [Kaleidoscope Festival] in Wicklow, and it’s an all-ages thing. There were 20,000 people and it was just incredible to see kids on their parents’ shoulders and kids five and six years old singing our songs back to us because their parents have got them into our music. It was really magical; it was so special,” said O’Reilly.
“We’re really fortunate that our audience has grown with us. As we’ve evolved naturally as songwriters there’s been things that have happened within the band as well. Our guitar player [Dave McPhillips] for our first four albums left [in 2019]. He just had enough and he wanted to change his career path. But we wanted to keep going. We’re still good friends and stuff, so that was a thing. And then we had COVID which isn’t ideal when you’re in a band called The Coronas [the proper name of the disease being Corona Virus Disease – COVID] as well. But in a long answer to your question, we’ve got through all that and evolved naturally. I think we never really reacted to things going on around us and we’ve never tried to be anything we weren’t. We let the music lead us and our tastes changed as we got older as well and we weren’t pigeonholed into being a band that needs to sound like this, and our next album needs to sound like this too.
“Again, having our own label is key for that because there’s no one breathing down our necks to say we need a single just like a single from the last album and we need a song that’s going to work on radio. Actually, what we learned is that when you’re with a label, and we were signed to Island Records when we moved to London [before the debut release]. We signed a big record deal with them, and Island is part of Universal Music, and they have U2 and Mumford & Sons and Hozier and everyone. And when it didn’t work out with them we thought when things go wrong with a label, you’re like, ‘they didn’t put the music out right. They didn’t do this right. They didn’t do that right. They released the wrong song,’ and blah, blah, blah. When you start your own label, as we did [before the release of 2017’s Trust The Wire album] you realize you’ve got no one else to blame but yourself, so it made us work a lot harder. Very quickly we were much more involved in the business side of things than we’d ever been before and there almost became two strands of The Coronas – the record label and the band. And even that gave us a new lease on life as musicians, I think, because now we saw the whole picture in a different way. Right down to picking where we tour and planning when we’re going to record, when we’re going to write and all of a sudden we took a lot more ownership of our music and of everything else, and that helped us evolve too. But it’s all been pretty natural. We still try and keep to the initial things that made The Coronas, that made those early songs connect with people, even when we were 20, and that’s having honest songs that come from the right place, that are authentic to us and have melody and have, I suppose, a positivity there. We still keep to those fundamentals, but everything else has evolved around those fundamentals.”
It is probably because of the fact that the three permanent members of the band all started literally and figuratively at the same place as musicians and artists, and grown, and learned and sacrificed and enjoy the good times and weathered the storms, that they have been able to maintain their friendships and working relationships so effectively.
“We’re friends first and foremost and we know each other so well. We’re like brothers. We can have an argument and get over it and it’s forgotten about. And we trust each other as well. I think having trust is key. And we love what we do. We love it. I think in a way our friendship is probably not what it quite was because we spent so much time together and now the guys, Conor and Knoxie both have wives and families. So, now when we get off the road, it’s not like we’re hanging out all the time. Although in saying that, we did have a joint birthday party a couple of months ago, which shows you that we still do like hanging out. We have our separate lives and I think that’s healthy,” he said.
“When we have a bit of time off, we go off and do our own thing and then we look forward to seeing each other and talking about what we did. It’s always about honest communication, and the fact that we still like hanging out. We like each other and we are lucky because I know it can be difficult to keep those relationships going, especially in a band where there’s egos involved – me more than them [laughs]. I think whatever little hiccups we’ve had; we’ve gotten through them and stayed together and I think now we appreciate and enjoy everything a lot more.”
The notion of trust is intrinsic in any relationship. When one person is the primary creative force, especially in a band, whose career lives and dies with the reception of those songs by the music-consuming public, that trust is amplified. But based on the aforementioned discussion of how and why the terrific triumvirate at the core of The Coronas has remained solid, is that they trust O’Reilly’s creative instincts. And he, in turn, trusts their own tastes, takes and tweaks of his song ideas.
“I’m the main songwriter within the group so they have a trust in me musically. They give it to me honestly though. I’ll send them some songs and sometimes it’s like dead air and I’m like, ‘oh God, that one didn’t go down well.’ And other times they say, ‘yeah, it’s okay,’ or other times, ‘I love it.’ You’ve got to have that trust because songwriting is an ego thing and every time you finish an idea you think it’s good. You wouldn’t finish it unless you think it’s really good. And every single little idea, every song I finish, I get really excited about and it’s hard to send that to people for them to go, ‘hmm, I’m not sure about it.’ That hurts and I’ve gotten better at being able to deal with that for sure because oftentimes maybe an album’s gone by and I’ve really fought for a song that I think, ‘no, no, no, this is it! This is it!’ And the guys will say okay and then the song will get onto the album and do nothing and I will think, well, I should have listened to the guys initially, because they have less skin in the game and can be more objective,” O’Reilly said.
“But we do write together as well. I’ll come in with a few ideas and we’ll jam out and we always arrange everything together. And I always say, even if I’ve co-written songs and I do co-write with a couple of other friends of mine as well, I will work on those ideas and then still bring them to the band. It only really becomes a Coronas song when the three of us play it in a room together and if it works like that, with no bells and whistles, just the three of us and it still sounds cool, then it becomes a Coronas song and we build it up from there.
“We’re so lucky to have the kind of relationship where we can do that and also where we can just look at each other onstage and the one person will know exactly what the other is thinking. Like at that family festival I was talking about in Wicklow, there was a little bit of a kerfuffle in the front row with two people arguing and there was security there and you don’t want to bring attention to it, because it wasn’t like it was dangerous or anything. But I could just look at Knoxie, our bass player, and he looked at me and we both knew, we both spotted it, so now let’s pretend there’s something going on over in the other direction and play the rest of the show over that way so all the crowd look away from the incident. It’s little things like that you get good at, where it’s just a nod and a look. We love each other. They’re my oldest friends and, listen, we’ve been blessed to go on this journey together.”
The connection the bandmates share on stage is mirrored by the connection The Coronas have with their fans through the conduit of their music. Their last four albums, including 2024’s Thoughts & Observations, topped the Irish charts – which is interesting considering all four of those records were released independently on the band’s So Far So Good label, adding more proof that the band knows its own music and audiences best.
“I’ve always found the more personal, and not only the more personal, but almost the more specifically personal I am about the stuff that I’m literally going through in my life, when I put that into our songs, they’re the ones that people relate to the most. They understand, ‘hey, he’s being genuine there and I’m feeling genuine now.’ So, I find the lyrics can never be too specific, never be too honest because as I say, If I try and get too clever and am trying too hard to not say what’s already been said before, or I’m trying to find this really poetic way of saying this simple thing, people are going to say, ‘well, you made an effort and you’re trying to be clever, but if you’re just honest, that’s the raw emotion we want.’ And I know that, because I like lyrics that hit me where I can feel what the writer is feeling in that moment. And, really, being honest and real is poetic.”
A wonderful example of sharing cool moments with such close friends happened just a couple of weeks ago. A recent highlight for the band, indeed for any band or artist, was the opportunity to play one of the largest and most prestigious music festivals in the U.K., and indeed the world – Glastonbury.
“It was amazing. I was expecting it to be fun, and first of all, the show went well. But you don’t necessarily know how you’re going to be received. The tickets sell out before the lineup is announced, so you never know if your music is going to suit the people who have bought the tickets, and if they care, if they even want to see you. But we had a great crowd for our set and the gig went well and we were delighted. We were just so excited to be there and to play at such a prestigious festival. It’s very different from every other festival, and we’ve played a lot of festivals, and even still, it outdid my expectation,” said O’Reilly.
“I guess I thought because it’s so big that it’s going to be a bit daunting and overwhelming as a site. I mean there’s a quarter of a million people at this thing. But there’s just such a nice atmosphere. It’s such a friendly, cordial environment. There is just something in the air, and it’s not too ‘hippie dippy’ either. It’s not all over-the-top ‘peace and love,’ although I guess it is sort of about peace and love, but it’s just at a nice level. And there’s no corporate vibe to it. If you want to get a beer, there’s no big Budweiser or Heineken signs. There’s all these little mom and pop bars everywhere, and they charge whatever they want, and they can serve whatever they want. So, we found this tiny little bar that had extra cold Guinness and we were like, ‘okay, we’ll be back.’ That’s just a small example.
“And I’ll give you another example. I couldn’t really see much security at the festival. I know it was there, but it wasn’t really that visible. There’re no high-vis people around. And I said to my buddy, our saxophonist, I could see a family and they had a toddler running around. And I wondered if you lost your toddler, what would you do here? I can’t see any security; there’s no information points or anything. And he had an answer, which I think encapsulates the whole vibe of the festival. He’s like, ‘yeah, well you’d probably just say something to the person beside you and in about 10 minutes time, you’d have 250,000 people helping you find your toddler.’ To me, that sums up the whole festival. It just has an atmosphere; it has a vibe. And of course, the music was great and we really enjoyed it. The weather was lovely. It’s a beautiful sight and it feels friendly and homely and small, even though it’s ginormous.”
Although The Coronas had been around for more than two decades, they never really were actively campaigning to get on the Glastonbury bill, it’s just that one of the first things their new booking agent [Neil O’Brian] promised them when they signed was a chance to get one of the highly competitive positions for 2025.
“What happened this year for us is we moved to different agents and the first thing they did was say, ‘oh, we’ll get you a slot at Glastonbury.’ They thought it was crazy that we hadn’t played there before. I mean, I suppose in years gone by, it’s not like we were campaigning for it, but we probably would have been put forward. So, yeah, a big shout out to our new agent. It’s a festival that’s so prestigious and important that every band wants to play it. They come from all over the world to play it [including Canada’s Alanis Morissette on the Friday night this year]. But, you know, it’s not a money-making festival, and that goes for the bands as well. I know that Michael Eavis [a dairy farmer who hosts the even on his property and who is its main organizer] and the family, they don’t do it to make lots of money. It operates almost like a charity. It’s meant to just break even and all that sort of stuff,” O’Reilly explained.
“And it’s like that for the bands too. I heard a very interesting story about The 1975 who headlined the Friday night, where apparently they spent more on their production budget, a lot more, than what their actual fee was for the show, because they realized that there’s eyes on them from all over the world. It was being broadcast live in the BBC. It’s a huge moment for them as a band, so they invested hundreds of thousands into their stage show and production. And I can see why they do that. I mean, we did it for less than what we would normally get paid for a festival is what I’m getting at, but of course you’re going to do it. It’s so important and prestigious that it’s an honour to play there.”
With the memories of Glastonbury still close in the rear-view mirror, The Coronas are set to hop across the Atlantic Ocean for a run of dates through North America, with the two aforementioned shows in Canada. Touring has become trickier and a lot more expensive in recent years, especially since the COVID pandemic, so if bands are even able to tour internationally logistically and financially, they’re a lot more strategic as to how they go about it. And being experienced veterans of the touring scene, O’Reilly and his bandmates are no exception.
“Post-COVID, we’ve been going to North America probably once a year, trying to keep the momentum going and building up our audience there. We’re lucky that we have almost a different size audience in every territory that we tour in. And we’re also lucky in that we still sell tickets and that we still can tour because it’s expensive these days. It’s funny because you mentioned earlier that we’re an interesting story. And I think we are unusual in that we’re an independent band and yet we’ve released a lot of records and we’ve been around for a while. We do very well in Ireland and we’re lucky enough to sell a lot of tickets here, but we’ve also sort of created these little pockets of support around the world. Relatively speaking, our streaming numbers are small, but then our first records came out when people were still buying lots of CDs. We have a really loyal following everywhere we go. People come out and the energy at our shows is really good. We still love touring and travelling to whatever sized rooms we play in. In Australia, for example, we would play bigger shows than we will on this run in the States and Canada. Actually though, the last time we played in Vancouver we played at this beautiful outdoor theatre in a park and it was amazing. The crowd we had there was incredible. And we’ve done great shows in Toronto too,” he said.
“Honestly, Toronto is one of my favourite cities. I love playing there. I just love spending a couple of days there. There’s something about that city that I’ve always liked. We have a really good family friend who grew up in St. Catharines, and we used to travel down there a bit. In Toronto itself we’ve also got some really good friends there too now. What we used to do in the early days was we would tour everywhere and every city and see if we could build on each show. I think now we’ve gotten better at picking and choosing our dates. And because we’re our own record label, we can do shorter tours in the cities that we know are going to sell tickets. It is a pity sometimes when you miss out on some of the other centres. We’ll have people on our Instagram saying, ‘why aren’t you playing Montreal? Why aren’t you playing wherever?’ But we’ve developed a routing now where we know we can make it work as a band. When we’re our own label, and own manager, you have to make those decisions. As I say, it’s not an easy time to be in a touring band. It’s expensive to tour, it’s expensive for visas, you’ve got inflation and everything else. We do feel very lucky, though, especially because we’re not a widely known, huge act. It’s not like we’ve had a major label push and we’re a band that can just show up and sell a million tickets. It’s not always easy, and sometimes we have to make tough decisions, but we love it. And we’ve been lucky enough to keep selling enough tickets to keep us going.”
Even though Thoughts & Observations only came out a year ago, work is already underway for its follow up, according to O’Reilly.
“I used to tend to not write on the road, but I do a little bit now, even if it’s just a little idea, even little bits of lyrics; whatever I can get, just so when I get back off the road, I’ve got a starting point. These days I wouldn’t say I am writing a lot, but I keep dripping it along, so probably the first song I’m already over halfway through,” he said.
“For our next album, we’re planning on recording in January, with an eye to release it maybe next September, once we get through all the mixing and mastering and drip feeding a few songs out to the public before the album comes out. Looking back the first song for the previous album was written and recorded pretty much before the previous album was even out. I will try to write a few songs now, but the bulk of the writing will probably come after this North American tour.”
For more information on The Coronas. Visit https://thecoronas.net.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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