The Accidental Hit: How Snow Patrol Wrote "Chasing Cars"

Ever wanted to write a song so huge it becomes your pension plan? Here's the secret: pretend you're making it for someone else.

That's what Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody was doing back in 2005, in a garden shed owned by his friend and producer, Jacknife Lee.

"We wrote 10 songs in a couple of hours, over quite a few bottles of wine," he recalls.

"It was essentially a session for other people and sometimes, that takes the pressure off because you're not thinking about how you're going to record it, or what it means to have that song become part of your life."

Three bottles in, Lightbody stumbled on a chord sequence and a lyric: "If I lay here / If I just lay here / Would you lie with me and just breathe in the world?"

The atmosphere shifted. Suddenly, the session wasn't for anyone else. They'd found something that would change Snow Patrol's career forever.

"It's the song that took us to the whole world," Lightbody says. "We just followed it along like little ducklings."

That song was Chasing Cars. You know it. You might even be sick of it. It's been streamed more than two billion times. In 2019, it was named the UK's most-played radio song of the 21st Century.

But it wasn't finished that first evening. Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that the lyrics quoted above received a subtle rewrite. In total, it took months of work to perfect the song's deceptively simple arrangement.

"We even played it live a few times without finished lyrics," says Lightbody. "I hope those recordings have been destroyed. Those early lyrics were bad."

They haven't.

You can hear an embryonic version on YouTube, external, recorded in Seattle in 2005. At that point, Lightbody was pining for a woman who'd rejected his advances.

"You come to me / With these three words / 'Not right now'."

That storyline was eventually replaced with a more romantic one. But hearing it gives more context to the song's inscrutable title – borrowed from a phrase Lightbody's father had used about his son's hapless love life.

"You're like a dog chasing a car," he'd said. "You'll never catch it and you wouldn't know what to do with it if you did."

In its finished version, Chasing Cars was released as the second single from Snow Patrol's fourth album, Eyes Open, in June 2006.

A slow-burning hit, it peaked at number six in the singles chart, but really took off after being featured on the US medical drama Grey's Anatomy.

It's now the UK's eighth best-selling song of the 2000s, external, with a staggering 1.2 million copies sold.

"The numbers are ridiculous," says Lightbody.

"It doesn't make any sense in any kind of real way where you can go, 'These are the things that we did to become successful'.

"All of it happened by accident."

The answer was simply friendship. And the people Lightbody needed most were there on the stage with him.

"The natural state for bands is entropy. Everything falls to chaos. But it's kind of amazing, because it's happened the other way around for us," he says.

"We're not Emerson, Lake and Palmer travelling in separate buses. We're closer than ever."

You can hear it in the music and see it at their concerts.

After more than 30 years, people still want to feel the feelings that Snow Patrol make them feel. When they played an outdoor show at Liverpool's Pier Head last month, thousands of fans who'd been unable to get tickets turned up anyway.

"There was an enclosure for the 12,000 people that bought tickets – but at one point, I said, 'put your lights up', and I looked down the street, and it was just lights all the way down," says Lightbody.

"I think that's the key to our music, in a general sense. It's an invitation. There's no jackets for this club, there's no secret codes. It's like, 'just come and be with us'."