A major · Camelot 11B · 103 BPM
Chasing Cars
by Snow Patrol
- 103
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 57
- Danceability
- 20
- Acousticness
Snow Patrol were riding the success of their fourth album, Eyes Open, when they released "Chasing Cars" as its second single in the summer of 2006. Gary Lightbody had reportedly written the song while sobering up after a binge of white wine, in the garden of producer Jacknife Lee's cottage in Kent. He later called it the purest love song he had ever written, noting that his earlier love songs all carried a dark edge. The title phrase came from his father, who compared his pursuit of an unrequited crush to a dog chasing a car it would never catch.
The song found a much wider audience after appearing in the second-season finale of Grey's Anatomy on 15 May 2006, having already featured in the third-season finale of One Tree Hill earlier that month. It peaked at number six on the UK Singles Chart and number five on the Billboard Hot 100, and ended the year as the UK's 14th best-selling single. It was also the last song performed live on Top of the Pops.
The single proved remarkably durable. It sold over a million copies in the UK by October 2013 and reached 111 weeks in the official UK top 75 by 2019, a total bettered only by Frank Sinatra's "My Way". In 2009, PPL named it the most widely played song of the decade in the UK.
Chasing Cars runs at 103 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.33 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 583 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.