“Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol

"Chasing Cars" came off Eyes Open, Snow Patrol's fourth album, in 2006, and it's the song that turned the Northern Irish alt-rock band into a permanent fixture of the airwaves. Gary Lightbody wrote the words, the music is credited to him with Nathan Connolly, Jonny Quinn, Tom Simpson and Paul Wilson, and Jacknife Lee produced it and sat in on keyboards. It barely raises its voice: a simple figure turning over and over, Lightbody singing plainly, and a string section of violins, violas, cellos and double basses creeping in underneath until the thing swells like a held breath finally let go. Cenzo Townshend mixed it.

America met it on television, when it scored the second-season finale of Grey's Anatomy in May 2006, and the song took off from there. It earned a Grammy nod for Best Rock Song and a Brit nomination for Best British Single, but its real story is stamina. It became the band's biggest-selling single, it was the final live performance on Top of the Pops in 2006, and it kept moving copies long after release in the new download economy. PPL, the British licensing body, later ranked it the UK's most widely played song of those ten years, and ten years on, British radio counted it as the century's most-played song so far.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.