How Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars came from a boozy night out

15 June 2025, 14:00

Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody tells the story behind Chasing Cars

Watch the Snow Patrol frontman tell Radio X the story behind the band's most enduring single.

Gary Lightbody celebrates his 49th Birthday on 15th June 2025.

The Snow Patrol frontman has written some pretty famous songs over the years, but arguably none are as well known as Cashing Cars.

Back in 2020, the Northern Irish and Scottish band's 2006 single - which was taken from their fourth studio album, Eyes Open - was dubbed the most popular track on UK radio for over the last 20 years.

Despite only peaking at number six in the UK, the song stayed in the charts for three years and has remained omnipresent in pop culture ever since - thanks to its appearance on popular US series Grey's Anatomy.

Radio X have the story of how the song came to fruition from the man himself. It involves a very boozy night, a sore head and plenty of gigging.

Watch him explain all in our video above.

Snow Patrol - Chasing Cars (Official Video)

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Lightbody recalled to Radio X: "In a pretty wild night of songwriting in 2005, myself and Jack Knightley in a studio in Kent [...] we wrote 10 songs, five of which ended up on Eyes Open, in the space of about three hours, and there was about a bottle of wine at least one an hour".

He continued: "Normally when you wake up from a night of songwriting and too much booze, you wake up and go, 'No, no no, no. This stuff isn't going to be heard by anybody,' but we were very lucky to have five songs like that that ended up on a record, and more lucky than we've ever got in our lives to end up with Chasing Cars, which obviously has endured longer than we ever could have hoped for".