Gas Stop

Album: How We Run (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • Before Cars is fronted by Chad Channing, who was Nirvana's drummer from 1988-1990. Geography prevented him from doing much writing with Nirvana, since he lived about an hour away from Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, but he's always had a passion for writing songs.

    "Gas Stop" was inspired by a real story that sounds like it could be a Macaulay Culkin movie. When Chad was six years old, his family was moving, so they packed up in their Ford truck with a camper attached. When they stopped for gas at a small town filling station, Chad was the last out of the bathroom, and discovered that the truck was gone. He told us the story: "I didn't know what to do, so I just walked down for maybe about a block or so and I sat down on the curb next to this telephone pole and sat there wondering what I was going to do next.

    And what had happened is usually one of us kids - I had two sisters with me at the time - would sit up in the cab in the front with my parents, and the other two would sit in the back. So my mom was like, 'Is everybody in?' And my sisters were like, 'Yeah, yeah.' My sisters assumed that I was up front in the cab and my parents thought that I was probably in the back with my sisters. And so hours down the road they realized that I wasn't in the car at all. And my mom about had a heart attack. I don't know how long I was there, but the sun was setting by the time I saw them. And I was still sitting in the same spot." (Here's our full Chad Channing interview.)

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