Dublin trio The Coronas share their Thoughts and Observations ahead of Australian album tour

Irish rock band The Coronas are heading back to Perth this year, playing Magnet House on Saturday, November 23, on a national tour—with tickets on sale now. The Dublin trio hit our shores in celebration of their eighth studio album, Thoughts & Observations. which lands this Friday, September 27, and the latest single from the record, Ghosting, which is out now. OLIVIA WILLIAMS sat down with lead vocalist and guitarist Danny O'Reilly to chat about breakups, touring, and being in a band with your best friends.

Congratulations on the tour! Is there anything in particular that you guys are excited about when it comes to touring Australia?

Yeah, there’s lots to look forward to. We love touring, we love being on the road, and we love seeing new cities. Even though this trip is a very short trip—we're only arriving a couple days before the Melbourne show, and then we have three shows in a row in three days with flights every morning, which we’ve done before: Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, then Europe in the morning—but, really, it's the people that we love the most, and there's always a great contingent of Irish people there with their Irish flags.

We sort of find that the further we are from home, the more Irish people feel, if you get me? They're waving their Irish flags, and they want me to sing in Irish or sing traditional songs, whereas the crowd in Ireland is like, “No, no, no, play the newer stuff; don’t play that older stuff,” and it’s funny how that happens. But yeah, we’re really buzzing; we’ve been lucky enough to tour Australia a few times over the years, and we’ve always been made welcome by Aussie fans, so we’re really looking forward to the whole experience.

What’s the vibe you’re hoping to bring to Perth this time around? Any special plans for the show at Magnet House?

We’re really looking forward to the Perth show. Magnet House is a venue we’ve never played at before, but we’ve been lucky enough to play in Perth a few times over the years, whether it be out in Fremantle or in the city. We have a new support act, Conleth McGeary, who is really great and a friend of ours that has supported us before. We’re also bringing a bigger band this time around; the last couple of tours we’ve done outside of Ireland, we’ve sort of brought the smaller bands.

There’s the three original main members in the band—’the OGs’, as I call it—which are myself, Conor our drummer, and Knox our bass player, and we are ‘The Coronas’ who write the music and record and stuff like that. Our amazing guitarist, Lara Kay, and my sister Roisin, who does the backing vocals, also come with us to the smaller shows outside of Ireland, and that has been the five-piece that we’ve toured with for a while.

But, for the shows at home, we also have our brilliant saxophonist, slash keyboardist, Kean, who has been playing with us for a while and will be coming with us to Perth this time around. It’s funny—a little sax solo can really make a show, and we’re really excited to have him come with us to Perth. Magnet House is also the biggest venue we’ve played in Perth so far, so it should be fun!

Your newest album, Thoughts and Observations, marks your eighth studio album and releases on the 27th of this month—a huge achievement. Is there a song on the album that stands out to you personally? If so, I’d love to hear what makes it so special for you.

There’s a couple, but I think the one that speaks out to me the most is our more recent duet with Gabrielle Aplin called That’s Exactly What Love is. I wrote that song in a tiny room in Dublin, and I guess I always saw it as a duet and was writing the song from two people’s perspectives—I even sang the female part in high falsetto in the original demo. But when I wrote it, straight away I had it in my head that Gabrielle would be singing it with me. I had sort of overproduced the demo I did originally, and I had all these fancy ‘blips’ and ‘blops,’ and it was real ‘production-y’ with synths and stuff like that.

But our amazing producer George Murphy saw the song in the middle and said to me, “You know what? It doesn’t need all these fancy production sounds. This song is a pretty song, and it should be organic and natural.” Gabrielle had done a collaboration with us before on another album, and we were so happy when she agreed to do the duet this time around because she brought a new sort of level of magic to it. We kept it very organic and simple, and maybe I’m just sick of hearing my own voice, but I really liked the way it turned out.

We played it live for the first time last weekend, and it worked live, which is always a relief. It’s really only when you get out and play the song in front of a crowd that you can feel the connection, and you go, “Okay, this works.”

And what inspired you guys to create That's Exactly What Love Is?

Well, it’s definitely a depressing one, that’s for sure. Musically, it came together very quickly. We were inspired by some old duets by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush—they have a song called Don’t Give Up, which I love. That's Exactly What Love Is is a breakup song with an honest, emotional, heartfelt vibe that stemmed from text messages after a breakup. I decided to write it from two people’s perspective that were going through the same thing, but maybe see it in different ways. It was honestly very cathartic for me to try and put myself in the other person’s shoes of what was going on.

There’s a line in the second verse that is from the female perspective that says, “Even now you have the nerve to write this and guess what I’m thinking.” It felt like I was actually talking to myself in the fourth person, so there’s some weird levels going on there, but I thought it was an interesting experience since I suppose every conversation within a relationship can be viewed in different lights. Initially I thought, “This is a nice thing to do; I’m going to see things from another perspective and try to be honest,” but then I thought against it because you could easily argue that I’m doing it for my own therapy or to make myself look good, or even say, “How could you know what the other person is actually going through?”

So it was interesting to get really deep into it that way with that sort of honest to and fro. It’s almost a country thing that isn’t really done anymore, where you sing a line, and someone sings back as if it’s a conversation. If you had told me that I was going to sit down and try to write a song like that, I would’ve been like, “No way I’m going to do that; that sounds so cheesy,” but it just worked; it didn’t feel cringey, and I always find with my lyrics that the more honest I am with what I’m going through, the better it connects with the people who listen.

With sold-out tours and an ever-growing global fanbase, what’s been the most surprising or rewarding part of your career?

I think we are very lucky, and that’s one thing I have taken from our career: just gratitude and how blessed we are and proud we are of our own longevity. The longer we do it, the prouder of it we are, and it’s not easy to keep a band going this long in this climate. I mean, our first album came out in the late naughties when we were only teenagers and we were just winging it—we still are, to a certain extent, but we sort of just evolved.

People often say to me, “Would you ever change anything about your career?” And sometimes I think maybe we should’ve held out on our first album and tried to get all the industry things in place first—like a label, a management company, and publishing—and maybe made sure we had a better online presence. That would be the advice that a manager or a label might give a young act now, but I do think that because we didn’t really know what we were doing, it ‘locked in’ our longevity so to speak.

We’ve been friends our whole lives, and one day we just decided to go on this journey together, and here we are after fifteen years, still doing it. I'd also say we’re at a better stage now as a band; at this point we know the territories to play in, so we have a good balance of a home life and being on tour since we're not rolling the dice and playing everywhere across Europe and hoping someone might come.

We’re so lucky that now we get to come to Australia for the long weekend and have a few shows in America and Ireland beforehand, so we see these amazing places but we’re not on tour for months on end. But we love it, and as I said, the more we do it, the more we appreciate it, and the more we appreciate getting to go on tour. We’re best friends, the crew is like our family, and we have a great time on tour. We’re excited to come back to Australia!