Chasing Cars - The postscript

Music can make the world a much more bearable place, definitely. We couldn’t live without other people's music and making our own.- Gary Lightbody

A fishbone had been stuck somewhere in between my pharynx and epiglottis, so I guess. it has been there for two days now and it’s so awful to imagine swallowing eternally rice balls for a cure. (At least you’ll gain a few pounds for that-Mr. Standard). I couldn’t bear so much of the chewing but for the pain of gulping down because of that little fishbone which surreptitiously entered my system.

A few days more of this experience will grow me into a petulant being for sure. The drowning sound of Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars was a quick sedate. I remember a doctor telling me to bite my tongue hard to ease the pain of injecting the syringe. According to him, this will retract my attention to the squalid pain of the syringe into the pain of biting my tongue, my own tongue. (And that’s more dignified?) The song did just that. It took my attention relentlessly away from the pain and the throbbing.

I first heard Chasing Cars from Marian, my guru of alternative music. It is from her that I came to know what passion in music is. Passion in music is Keane’s Walnut Tree, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’s Maps (with the drooling and the melting mascara), Urbandub’s Quiet Poetic and Cynthia Alexander’s Comfort in your Strangeness. As Marian always quipped, these songs forebear the wisdom and non-chalance to the nth degree: emong emo!!!

Chasing Cars has been played for the 91^st time according to the stats in my Winamp player and it never loses the thrill and interest I felt the first time I played and heard it. Gary Lightbody said that this was “the most pure and open love song he has written.” Pure and open it is, the swooning of the chords and the natural croon combine perfectly to bring mirages of fast-moving scenes in the window of the car and the profile of different emotions appearing on the background. Chasing Cars ' lyrical archetype depicts a solitary refusal: I-refuse-to-be-alone-but-I-most-enjoy-the-feeling-caused-by-it thing.

Lightbody’s attempt in the asymmetry of a dog chasing a car and infatuation is a real flabbergast. Still, to me it is in the nature of a comic and goes beyond the stationary picture. The postscript of the moment is that the dog continued to chase after the car in vain and barked its way to frustration and destiny.