Chasing Cars is the most-played song of the 21st Century on UK radio. In this thread you will have the opportunity to listen to it again

Music
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(I Gotta Feeling was second)

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Zoinks, Scoob

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Thank you for bringing this to our attention

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Poor radio listeners :frowning:

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I’ve still never worked out if the chorus makes sense or not. Should it be if I laid here? If I lie here? If I lay here doesn’t seem quite right.

I imagine this grammatical grey area is the source of the song’s continued success and popularity

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it’s just such a genre spanning song that could appeal to absolutely anyone.

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Gary Lightbody seems like a GBOL, but I reckon Chasing Cars is probably the most boring song I can think of, in terms of lyrics, composition and musical arrangement.

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I suppose the thing with this is that Snow Patrol spent years grubbing around the indie touring circuit (saw them supporting Seafood in 2002, ffs) and never really got anywhere, so I can’t really begrudge them making serious bank with something as bland and rote as this.

Remember them getting loads of grief from indie kids at the time, but maybe the indie kids would’ve been better off buying their early records.

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Yes, I’ve wondered the same thing. The ‘if’ confuses things because you can say:

If I eat here would you eat here with me

but you could also say

If I ate here would you eat here with me

The problem is that the past tense of lie is lay which is exactly the same as another word which means something else

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Here’s someone explaining it far better than I did:

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A pal of mine at the time bought the album and then went and got all their other shite, purely because Martha Wainwright was on the album and that apparently was a sign of quality.

Edit: oops!

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I feel as though I’ve not heard it for quite a long time actually

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Surely “I lay down” is pretty common parlance, you nerds

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No one ever believes me when I tell them the first album sounds a bit like Sebadoh

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Did the snow patrols catch the cars in the end?

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As far as I can tell it makes sense, but only just.

‘Interestingly’, the song in second place in the rankings, I Gotta Feeling is a bit dodgy grammatically as well, given that ‘gotta’ usually means ‘got to’. I Got To Feeling does make sense in a way but I suspect BEP actually meant I Got A Feeling but used Gotta instead for SEO reasons or something.

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The real cars were the friends we chased along the way

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It’s a rhetorical chase

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Shouldve been chocolate

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I genuinely think snow patrol have had some awesome songs

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