20 year old car chase snow patrol and their song with Kylie

Have you ever wanted to write a song that was so huge it became your retirement plan? Here’s the secret: Pretend you’re working for someone else.

That’s exactly what Snow Patrol Gary Lightbody was doing in the backyard in 2005, owned by friend and producer Jackniff Lee.

“We wrote 10 songs in two hours, over a few bottles of wine,” he recalls.

“It was basically a session for other people and sometimes it takes the pressure off because you don’t think about how you’re going to record it or what it means to have that song be a part of your life.”

In Three Bottles, Lightbod stumbles upon a chord sequence and rhyme:If you sleep here / if you sleep here / will you sleep with me and breathe in the world?

The atmosphere changed. Suddenly, the session was for no one. They discovered something that would change the work of the Snow Patrol forever.

“It’s the song that took us all over the world,” Lightbody says. “They followed us like little ducks.”

That song was Chasing Cars. do you know. Maybe you can get sick of it too. It has been streamed over two billion times. In the year Named in 2019 The UK’s most played radio song 21st century.

But it wasn’t over that first night. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a subtle rewriting of the above lyrics. All in all, it took months to complete the song’s deceptively simple arrangement.

“We’ve even played live a few times without finished lyrics,” Lightbody says. “I hope those recordings are destroyed. Those first lyrics were bad.”

They don’t have.

You can hear one Embryo version on YouTube, ExternalIn the year Recorded in 2005 in Seattle. At the time, Lightbody was courting a woman who rejected his advances.

“You come to me / with these three words / ‘not now’.“

That storyline was later replaced by romance. But hearing it gives more context to the song’s inscrutable title — a catchphrase from Lightbody’s father about his son’s unhappy love life.

“You are like a dog chasing a car,” he said. “You’ll never catch it, and if you do, you won’t know what to do.”

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

A slow-burning hit, it peaked at No. 6 in the singles chart, but really took off after appearing on US medical drama Grey’s Anatomy.

Now it’s UK. The eighth best-selling song of the 2000s, Externalsold an astonishing 1.2 million copies.

“The numbers are ridiculous,” Lightbody says.

“These are the things you did to be successful” doesn’t make sense in any real way.

“It all happened by accident.”