The Script lead singer Danny O’Donoghue first dealt with the sudden death of his childhood friend and Script guitarist Mark Sheehan by drinking a lot.
But on Dec. 27, after an alcohol-soaked Christmas packed with whiskey and despair, he decided it was time to face his grief instead of burying it.
“I realized by numbing myself, I wasn’t getting rid of those feelings. I was just kicking them down the road for awhile,” said O’Donoghue in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution before the Irish band’s headlining concert at the Roxy Oct. 11, followed by an opening date with Pink at State Farm Arena on Nov. 14. “I decided to give up alcohol for a month. Now here I am 10 months later still sober.”
O’Donoghue and the band, which had a series of big hits in the late 2000s and early 2010s like “Breakeven,” “For the First Time” and “Hall of Fame,” have since funneled their energies into a new Script album, “Satellites,” and a round of touring. “It’s been a long journey to get any sense of normality since it happened,” he said. “Each show gets a little easier.”
Without alcohol, O’Donoghue added, “I’ve been able to process things a lot clearer. The pain will come back in different ways, but I don’t need to have a drink to sort it out. I’m now very comfortable talking about things. Last year, thank God I didn’t go down some crazy hole. Thank God I didn’t let drink get the better of me. Lots of working out, lots of church, lots of praying. Here I am on the better side of it.”
The band decided to stick together after Sheehan’s death and record the new album late last year. “Everyone was lost,” he said. “It was weird at the time considering it was so fresh but we felt like if we didn’t have something to concentrate on, it would turn into negative energy.”
There are songs dealing with grief including “Gone,” which most directly addresses Sheehan’s life: “Like a shooting star across the sky/ In a second you were gone/ Why do stars that light up twice as bright/ Only burn for half as long?”
“That’s how he lived his life,” O’Donoghue said. “They always take the good ones too soon.”
The first concert without Sheehan was difficult. “I just closed my eyes and hoped for the best,” he said. And there were moments on tour where a hotel or a moment on stage would bring Sheehan back. “A lot of it is triggering but you have to get over those firsts,” he said.
The Script did hire two new band members. “We aren’t trying to pave over him or his legacy,” he said. “We decided to change the look from a three-piece band to a four piece. The change of personnel signifies a new chapter.”
In concert, the song O’Donoghue feels resonates the most is “The Man Who Can’t Be Moved,” a breakthrough 2008 hit about lost love in the U.K. that didn’t quite cross over stateside. “Even though ‘Breakeven’ has more streams online, ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ seems to be a bigger song. When you see it live, you just go, ‘There’s something really special about that song.’”
Opening for Pink in recent months, he said, has been a challenge. “We walk out a little scared,” he said, because it’s largely not their hard core fan base. “You’re never guaranteed you’ll get a hero’s welcome. I know with our own show, I could be dying of a cold and everyone in the audience will be singing along.”
He said at the Pink shows, the big hits at the end usually win over the crowd. “By that time,” he noted, “it might as well be a Script show.”
And watching Pink, he said, “is really inspiring. She’s a fierce, unrelenting force of nature. She’s also really loving.”
He also got to try out her trapeze. “I went all the way around the stadium in it,” he said. “She found out I was saying, ‘How hard could it be?’ So I got in the harness. She got the engineers to whip me around the stage. It was brilliant. It’s on my Instagram!”
In his 20s, Donoghue was a songwriter and producer before he hit it big with the Script and spent three weeks in Atlanta in 2002 recording songs with Dallas Austin for groups like TLC.,
“I grew up listening to American R&B and hip-hop,” he said. “I was a huge fan of TLC so I got to use the same mics that were used for ‘No Scrubs.’ It was an amazing studio. We were writing for other acts as well. We got a few cuts out of those sessions.”
He recalled buying traditional Irish music at local record stores with Austin and partying at Atlanta nightclubs. “I remember seeing DMX at a club,” he said. “It was crazy.”
IF YOU GO
The Script
7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11. $47 and up. Coca-Cola Roxy, 800 Battery Ave. SE, #500, Atlanta. livenation.com.
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