As many songwriters and composers will tell you, happiness is often not the best state to be in when creativity is needed. Broadly speaking, that little bit of friction and tension in the real world can serve as the perfect raw fuel for a masterpiece or two.
Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody would beg to differ however, having rustled up the band’s biggest hit - Chasing Cars - in a particularly blissful state, having just begun a new relationship.
"Chasing Cars I wrote when I was happy," Gary told Smooth Radio. "That's what came out. It's one of the few songs we've written that is a genuine love song - about being in love, while in love."
The song was birthed during a wine-fuelled writing session back in 2005 when the Northern Irish indie outfit were preparing to make fourth record Eyes Open.
It was one of a batch of songs that Lightbody concoted whilst in the salubrious setting of a converted garden shed, masquerading as a studio. Gary was in the live room, while regular contributor and producer Jacknife Lee was sat at the desk in his control room.
“I was staying with Jacknife at his house in Kent, which had a little studio he called The Garage,’ Gary told PRS For Music. “He was at the desk recording as I just wrote a bunch of stuff - a stream of consciousness. I wrote 10 songs that day, and we were three or four bottles of wine deep by the end of it! But five of those songs ended up on the album, one of which was Chasing Cars.
The song title itself was inspired by Lightbody’s father, who would chastise the young Gary for being utterly besotted by a girl in his youth. According to one source, he would say to Gary - “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." It's a phrase that stuck with him.
Lightbody wrote a tender lyric for the song, which basked in the radiance of his new love. Shutting out the surrounding noise of the world, Gary evoked the transcendental contentment of simply laying side by side with the object of his affection.
Its soon-to-be iconic chorus stressed the euphoria felt when sharing a moment of quiet intimacy with the person your want to spend your life with.
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
“It's the purest love song that I've ever written,” Gary told Rolling Stone, “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."
Its emotive lyric in place, it was the towering, rising arrangement constructed by the entire band - Tom Simpson, Paul Wilson, Jonny Quinn and Nathan Connolly - that ensured that Chasing Cars cut through. And boy, did it cut through…
The fact that the song was written so swiftly is perhaps key to its simple-but-effective structure. So let’s break down just why it works so well…
The entirety of Chasing Cars is based around an 8-bar chord progression, and just three chords. This construct could conceivably be quite repetitive and boring, but it’s reliant upon two strong elements which form the supporting cast.
Firstly, there’s the aforementioned strength of the vocal performance and melodic line, which switches construct as it moves between the verse and chorus sections.
Secondly, the arrangement ebbs and flows, moving from very minimal, to an elevated dynamic to heighten the chorus elements.
If we consider the opening section, we hear the distinctive picked guitar motif. The song is rooted in A major, but the initial open chord, with the picked notes of A and E, remains a constant in terms of texture.
The chord sequence itself consists of A (open/major), C# minor, D major(9) and back to A, with each chord being played for a full 2-bars.
The exact nature of each chord slightly alters, depending on its location within the song, and this is down to a number of differing factors.
To begin with, the sparseness of the picked A and E is shored up by a guitar playing open chords underneath, in a relatively subdued and muted style.
The second chord C#m, is not fully revealed in the first verse, although the picked A and E does switch to a G# and E here to embrace the harmony, and could imply a chord of E major instead.
It's only as the song progresses that the solidifying nature of the harmony becomes more apparent, although as we reach the chorus sections, the emphasis on an increased dynamic through the use of distortion plays a trick on the ear. It adds harmonic overtones to fill in the notational gaps in a chord. It's a very clever and common trick, and one that works very successfully here.
We do particularly like the 3rd D major chord in the sequence, which thanks to the presence of the picked A and E, turns the chord into D major9. This is bolstered later in the song, with the addition of a fuller orchestration, laying the sweetness of a major9 chord in the perfect location, before resolving back to the tonic chord of A. It's a choice that emphasises the size of the underlying emotion.
The ‘chugging' effect which presents itself throughout the track, is generated by the continual emphasis on 8th notes. This becomes far more apparent once we reach the second chorus, although the full arrangement salvo isn't released until we get to the third chorus, when finally the bass and drums embrace the 8th-note chugging in a form of band unison.
There are some nice production tricks to maintain the dynamic energy and ‘blooming’ nature of the song. There are synthetic sustains in both the bass and pad form, which help to maintain the gradual build, with each chorus giving us just a little bit more of a dynamic rise, before pulling back toward the end of the song. Nicely symmetrical!
Chasing Cars was clearly a winner, but post-release as a single on June 6th 2006, the song - like its arrangement - built and built, eventually becoming an evergreen radio staple.
Despite the fact that it never reached the top of the UK charts, it remained within the chart for more than three years.
And live, the song went off…
“It felt like it didn’t matter what room we were playing in, what size, what festival — the whole place would be singing,” Gary told PRS.
In the US, its placement in the season finale of uber-popular medical drama Grey’s Anatomy took the song - and Snow Patrol - to a whole new level.
According to Lightbody, Chasing Cars started out well outside the top 100 on the US iTunes chart. (In 2006, standing within this newfangled iTunes chart was deemed to be one of the best benchmarks of popularity in the nascent iPod era.) The day after the DVD release of the show's second season later that year, it was at No.1.
The single release peaked at number #5 on the US Billboard Top 100 - the band’s biggest success to date and one of the top selling rock songs of the 'digital' era.
Aptly, for a song that had achieved such mass exposure, Chasing Cars was chosen to be the very last song to be performed on the legendary BBC music staple, Top of the Pops. Gary considered the song one for the people;
“It’s a song that has perhaps got into the musical consciousness, which is something we're very proud of. It's rare that any band has a song that goes that deep into the world,” Gary told PRS
The most notable recent accolade came in 2019, when it was crowned the most-played song on UK radio by music licensing body PPL. "It's unbelievable," Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody told the BBC. "I'm not sure how that happened.
"It's an emotionally open song and it's a simple song. But it's also unabashedly a love song, and we don't really have any others” said an overwhelmed Gary. “The way it unifies an audience is the thing I most cherish about it. It's a beautiful moment every time you play it."
