“Breakeven” band The Script, currently opening up for Pink on her Summer Carnival tour, just released their new album, Satellites. It’s their first album since the 2023 death of the trio’s guitarist, Mark Sheehan, who passed away at age 46 after an undisclosed illness. But the album isn’t a downer — it’s actually pretty upbeat, and lead singer Danny O’Donoghue says it’s because of Mark’s influence.
“I feel like I wanted to celebrate somebody’s life as opposed to grieving the loss,” he tells ABC Audio. “It’s quite reflective. It’s very sentimental, it’s very introspective. But I just had Mark on my shoulder being like, ‘You need more tempo in there. Is it radio enough? Is it top 40 enough?'” he continues. “So I guess the reason why it’s that way is almost because of him.”
Danny notes, “I know he wouldn’t want us all sitting around moping.”
And while fans are no doubt glad that The Script is continuing, Danny says he did it more for himself.
“I feel like I’m after saving my own life by putting this band together again,” he says. He says he forced himself to schedule time to write new music, thinking, “Let’s see if we can … write our way out of this.”
“And what it did was, it just anchored us, you know, it put us in a place where we were able to dream again.”
The title of the album pays tribute to Mark: “Satellites” is a song the band worked on before he died.
“He loved the song himself. And I just felt like satellites was a beautiful way to imagine Mark, because a satellite has a beautiful vantage point … it’s up above the world, and it gets to look down on the Earth,” says Danny. “Mark is like a satellite to us.”
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