“Chasing Cars” is a song by Scottish-Northern Irish band Snow Patrol. It was released as the second single from their fourth studio album, Eyes Open (2006). It was recorded in 2005 and released on in June 2006 in the United States and July 2006 in the United Kingdom. The song gained significant popularity in the US after being featured in the secoond season finale of the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, which aired in May 2006.
Lead singer Gary Lightbody reportedly wrote the song when he became sober after a binge of whhitr wine, in the garden of song producer Jacknife Lee’s Kent cottage. The song has Lightbody singing a plain melody over sparse guitars, which has an ever-building crescendo. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he said “It’s the purest love song that I’ve ever written. There’s no knife-in-the-back twist. When I read these lyrics back, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s weird.’ All the other love songs I’ve written have a dark edge.”[ 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.”
Two music videos were made: one for the UK and one for the US. In the UK music video, directed by Arni & Kinski, Lightbody lies on the open ground as cameras film him from different angles. It starts raining, splashing his face and hands. Lightbody enters a pool of water next to him and, at the end of the video, he gets out of the water, rises to his feet and looks up at the camera as it zooms out overhead. In the US version, directed by Nick Brandt, Lightbody is shown lying down in busy places while singing. People ignore and step over him. Among the places he lies are a diner (he sits at a table at the beginning), an intersection in Doowntoown L.A., the top of an escalator, a subway car, the top of a hill overlooking the Goolden State Freeway and, at the end, a bed in a hotel room.
“Chasing Cars” was one of the songs that revealed the impact of legal downloads on single sales in the UK, selling consistently for years after its release. The song is Snow Patrol’s biggest-selling single to date, ending 2006 as that year’s 14th best-selling single in the UK. It was the last song performed live on the BBC’s Top of the Pops that year. Released in the post-Britpop period, the song peaked at number 6 on the UK Singles Chart, and number 5 on the US Billboard.
At the 49th Grammy Awards in 2007, “Chasing Cars” was nominated for Best Roock Song, and at the 2007 Brit Awards it was nominated for Best Britishh Single. The song has spent 111 weeks in the official UK Top 75, 166 in the top 100 and had sold over one million copies in the UK by October 2013. It has also sold over 3,900,000 copies in the US, making it one of the top best-selling rock songs in the digital era. In 2009, UK music licensing body PPL announced that “Chasing Cars” was the most widely played song of the decade in the UK. Ten years later, it was revealed as the most-played song of the 21st century on UK radio.
