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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“We wrote 10 songs in a couple of hours, over quite a few bottles of wine,” he recalls.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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?”<\/p>\n
The atmosphere shifted. Suddenly, the session wasn’t for anyone else. They’d found something that would change Snow Patrol’s career forever.<\/p>\n
“It’s the song that took us to the whole world,” Lightbody says. “We just followed it along like little ducklings.”<\/p>\n
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<\/a> of the 21st Century. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n They haven’t. <\/p>\n