It was a joy to be back in that control room at the back of the Marlin Hotel, immersed in the process. Mixing, when you’ve made a good record, feels like a lap of honour. The race is run. You’re not chasing anymore, you’re revealing what’s already there.

And with someone like Tom at the helm, you could relax into it. You knew what came back through the speakers would carry weight, would have that thing he always talked about, a bit of “spank” to it.

“Sparkle”, more than anything, came alive in those sessions. You could feel it immediately. It wasn’t just another track. It had something. It became clear, sitting there listening back, that we might have a radio song on our hands.

We’d spend the day between the beach and the studio, sand still on our feet, flip-flopping back and forth before settling in to hear the mixes come through the speakers.

And there it was.

Weight, clarity, presence. Not a demo, not a maybe. A record. The kind of sound we’d been chasing for years.

You realise things in moments like that. Not all at once, but enough to know you’ve crossed a line.

Simon brought the song back to Island records head office in New York . He took it into the A&R meeting, one of those rooms where everything depends on a single decision, where something either goes through or it doesn’t.

In this case, it was Lyor Cohen at the top table, cigar gripped between veneered white Hollywood teeth, rings of smoke rising like signals, deciding your fate.

Apparently he stood up and applauded the song, setting off a chain reaction that said we had passed through the eye of the needle, that the record company were going to throw their significant weight behind it.

Game on.

By the time Rise was released in 2002, we had already carried our songs a long way out of Cork and across America. Through vans and motel rooms, through soundchecks and long drives through the nights, through the slow, uncertain work of staying at it .

That’s what we carried.

In Ireland, there was a tradition. When people left, during the famine and long after, they carried very little with them. But they carried songs. And when they turned back to their families and asked what they might bring home, the answer was often the same.

Bring me back a song.

Those songs travelled. Across the Atlantic. Into Newfoundland, into the Appalachian Mountains, into places far from where they began. And sometimes, years later, they found their way home again.

What we were doing didn’t feel so different.

We carried our songs out into the world, and somewhere along the line, one of them began to travel further than the rest.

When “Sparkle” was released, it moved.

Not loudly at first, but with a kind of certainty. It slipped into heavy rotation, into cars, into radios, coast to coast. It found its way into people’s lives without asking permission, moving faster than any plan around it, leaving even the record company trying to catch up.

Driving through heat haze on Sunset Boulevard, windows down, you’d hear it drift in from another car. A chorus catching in the air, belonging to no one and everyone at the same time.

That was the moment.

Not when it was written, not when it was recorded, but when it left us.

Severance. Threshold. Return.

Only this time, it wasn’t a person crossing the ocean.

It was a song.

It carried us with it.

We moved across America in waves of gigs and miles, playing to rooms that got bigger as we went. There was momentum, real momentum. But there were gaps too. We never had the video that might have pushed it further. MTV and VH1 were still shaping the landscape then, and we stood just slightly outside that current. Timing, decisions, a few things missed by inches.

Still, the songs held.

We had been together since school. Through all the versions of ourselves, all the false starts, all the near misses. And now, suddenly, it felt like we had something solid in our hands.

Eleven songs. Eleven reasons to keep going.

Rise opened the door.

It brought us to Late Night with Conan O’Brien, to the Ed Sullivan Theater for The Late Show with David Letterman, and into the Billboard charts; it was the strange, surreal feeling of being inside something we had only ever watched from a distance.