Snow Patrol - Chasing Cars

Snow Patrol - Chasing Cars

"Chasing Cars" is the second single from Snow Patrol's fourth album, Eyes Open. It was recorded in 2005 and released on June 6, 2006 in the US and 24 July 2006 in the UK as the album's second single.[1] "Chasing Cars" gained significant popularity in the United States after being featured in the second season finale of the popular medical drama Grey's Anatomy.[2]

It became notable as one of the songs that revealed the impact of legal downloads on single sales in the UK. The song is Snow Patrol's biggest-selling single to date, ending 2006 as the UK's fourteenth best-selling single of the year[3] and 2007, on the strength of downloads, as the UK's thirty-fourth best-selling single of 2007.[4]

As of 10 January 2010 the single has spent 96 weeks on the official UK Top 75 Singles Chart and 138 on the Top 100[5] and has sold 505,000 copies in the UK, despite missing the Top 5.

Lead singer Gary Lightbody wrote the song, sober after a binge of white wine, in the garden of producer Jacknife Lee's Kent cottage.[6] The song has Lightbody singing a plain melody over sparse guitars, which has an ever-building crescendo.[7]

He stated it was his "purest love song".[8] The phrase "Chasing Cars" came from Lightbody's father, in reference to a girl Lightbody was infatuated with, "You're like a dog chasing a car. You'll never catch it and you just wouldn't know what to do with it if you did."[citation needed][9]

The song was first heard on the band's 2005 Final Straw Tour, when they began playing it, along with two other newly written songs ("Your Halo" and "It's Beginning to Get to Me") they had intended to release on their upcoming album. Since then, the composition of the song was changed slightly, and most of the lyrics were rewritten.

Snow Patrol played "Chasing Cars" on an appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. The song was also performed as the last live performance on long-running music programme Top of the Pops. The band also performed the song when they were the musical guest on the 17 March 2007 episode of Saturday Night Live, hosted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Additionally, the band played the song live in their appearance at Live Earth. On 7 July 2007, this song was performed during the London leg of the Live Earth concert at Wembley Stadium and at Oxegen later on that night in Ireland.

"Chasing Cars" was heard on the TV show One Tree Hill episode "The Show Must Go On", which aired in the US on 3 May 2006. The show is popular amongst the teenage crowd,[citation needed] and the episode gained around 3.06 million viewers. It was not until several weeks later when the song appeared on the second season finale of Grey's Anatomy on 15 May 2006 that the song found a larger listening audience and pushed its way onto the download and pop charts in the United States. The song was made into a music video for the show, serving as a promotion for its third season. The music video shows scenes from the first and second seasons as well as previously unseen scenes from the third season, with clips in-between from the UK music video of the song.

There are two music videos: one for UK, one for the US.

In the music video for UK, Gary Lightbody lies on open ground as cameras film him from different angles. It starts raining, splashing his face and hands. Gary enters a pool of water next to him and in the end of the video, he gets out of the water, rises on his feet and looks up at the camera as it zooms out overhead.

In the US music video, Lightbody is shown lying down in busy places while singing. People ignore him and step over him. Among the places he lies are an alley, a diner, an intersection and at the top of an escalator.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Snow
• Patrol
• Chasing
• Cars