Songfacts®:

• This mysterious song finds the singer in a conversation with a young boy who has some very deep questions. "Tell me all your thoughts on God," he asks. "And tell me, am I very far?"
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Dishwalla frontman JR Richards, he explained: "It was a conversation between myself and the child within myself, but it was sparked by having a conversation with someone who was really young and around that time thought about God and those kinds of things, and just being really curious about it but hadn't been taught to think a specific way. I just loved the innocence and honesty of having that conversation with someone who didn't care either way how you would describe this or that - they were just curious."
• "I'd really like to meet her," the child in this song asks, referring to God. "From that younger perspective, I think we take things in a much more honest way because we are not being biased by how we're supposed to all think the same," JR Richards told Songfacts. "So this idea of God, being an omnipotent being, could be a male or female. We always refer to God as a male, so why not make it a female?"
• Children are curious and random, so counting only blue cars is not out of character. Songwriters are more deliberate, making sure words sounds just right within the lyric. That's why he's counting blue cars and not red or green ones: it sings best in this context.
• This was the only hit for Dishwalla, and it came at a time when "alternative" music was big, with bands like Collective Soul and Stone Temple Pilots dominating the airwaves. The song spent 48 weeks on the Hot 100, longer than any other one-hit wonder entry except for Duncan Sheik's "Barely Breathing," which stayed for 55 weeks.
• The phrase "counting blue cars" never shows up in the lyric, and the only time something close to it appears is in the second verse with the line, "We count only blue cars."
  
  Originally it was "Tell Me All Your Thoughts," JR Richards explained in his Songfacts interview. "As a songwriter, you typically pick the most repeated line or something that encapsulates what the subject matter is about, but I picked the line that I felt sounded the most poetic. And that upset our label because it appears just once in the song and they were concerned from a marketing perspective that people would come to the store and they wouldn't be able to find the song, because they wouldn't see 'Tell Me All Your Thoughts On God' on the album. So they ended up packaging it in a way where it says 'Counting Blue Cars' and in parentheses it would say 'Tell Me All Your Thoughts On God.' That was their way of handling that."
• In Hindi, the suffix "-walla" means a person who sells something. Dishwalla was the name given to satellite TV pirates in India, back in their day.
• Not everyone could handle the idea of God being a woman. Richards claims he got death threats over that line.
• In October 1995, this song was featured in the movie Empire Records, which takes place in a record store. This gave the song a nice jolt of credibility, and after a successful marketing campaign from the group's label, A&M, it was added to various radio station playlists and started climbing the charts. In August 1996, it reached its peak position of #15 on the Hot 100.
• Every member of the band contributed to the songwriting, and like every song on their first album, they are all credited on this track. Frontman JR Richards felt a particular burden though, as he was the lyricist. When "Counting Blue Cars" raced up the charts, it put pressure on him to come up with another hit. Prone to depression, he went to a dark place when they worked on their next album, And You Think You Know What Life's About, released in 1998. The song "Until I Wake Up" is about that experience.
• The video was directed by Chris Applebaum, whose credits include "Stacy's Mom" by Fountains of Wayne and "Closing Time" by Semisonic. It was shot at the Dome Village, an encampment in downtown Los Angeles for homeless people. The village, which opened in 1993, was comprised of 18 small fiberglass domes in what was once a parking lot. In 2006, it fell victim to rising property values and was shut down.
• This was used in the 2012 episode of How I Met Your Mother, "The Stamp Tramp." It was also used in the 1999 episode of Charmed, "The Devil's Music," where the band makes a guest appearance.
• Dishwalla went on hiatus in 2005. When they got back together in 2008, lead singer JR Richards wasn't part of hit - he moved to England in part so he could get better treatment for his son, who has a combination of autism and schizophrenia. Justin Fox took his place on lead vocals, and in 2015 this permutation of Dishwalla released a new version of the song as a single.
  
  Fox doesn't sound like Richards, but many fans don't know the difference. "Everybody knows the song and can sing along to it, and when we can play it to 10,000 people, nobody knows it isn't J.R.," drummer George Pendergast told RealClear.
  
  Richards agrees. "For a normal music lover who doesn't play or doesn't sing, they hear what they heard on the radio in their head 20 years ago even when they see it live in that moment and it's a different person playing and a different person singing," he said.