Two male dancers - one young and wearing a sweatsuit, the other older and in suit/tie/suspenders - each perform a routine of popping, locking, the robot, and breakdancing outside a restaurant. The dancers represent the same man at two different periods in his life, as evidenced by the orange high-top Chuck Taylor All-Stars sneakers they wear. The young man's shoes are clean and new, while those worn by the older man are faded, scuffed, and held together with tape. One day out of every year, the older man travels to the restaurant and dances on the sidewalk from sunrise to sunset. He does so in the hope of bringing back a lost girlfriend, who gave him the orange sneakers as a present when they were young but who ultimately left him because he could not stop dancing. The music pauses briefly while a few spectators voice their thoughts about the young woman's fate. At the end of the day, two of them leave to get a cup of coffee together; the older man catches a brief glimpse of his girlfriend's younger self, then picks up his belongings and leaves. The video was filmed at Chroni's Famous Sandwich Shop in East Los Angeles, California. Garland Spencer and Byron McIntyre portrayed the dancer's younger and older selves, respectively. There are two versions of the music video; one has the three band members observing from a table at the restaurant, while the other replaces those shots with footage of them in a silver Mitsubishi Eclipse stopped at a traffic light. In addition to the replaced shots, the Eclipse version of the video includes footage of the car arriving at and departing from a traffic light, suggesting that they arrived in the morning and remained at the light all day to watch the man dance.
Mitsubishi Eclipse advert
A Mitsubishi executive saw the music video for "Days Go By" in a hotel room, and personally tracked the group down to procure rights to feature the song in an advertisement. The song was licensed to be used in the Mitsubishi ad, which began airing in early 2002. A New York radio station began playing the song, which was subsequently released to rhythmic and top 40 radio stations in spring of 2002. American brand awareness for Mitsubishi went from 44% to 60% following the use of the song in the commercial.
The song was used in a promo for the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards. It parodied the music video and showed the host, Jimmy Fallon as the only dancer in the video.
The Mitsubishi Eclipse commercial was parodied by a skit on Chappelle's Show in which Dave Chappelle is driving a car and the woman is dancing in the passenger seat. Dave says, "What the fuck are you doing?" and then leaves her by the side of the road. He then puts on some hip-hop music and a black woman sits in the passenger seat and starts dancing. Although this is a parody of the Eclipse commercial, the car actually used in the commercial was Dave's own Nissan 350Z.
This song also appears in the game Dance Central for the Kinect peripheral on the Xbox 360. The routine performed is similar to the one in the music video.
This song inspired the stage dance sequence in the song "O Pardesi" from the film Dev D.
This song was also included in Grand Theft Auto Von the radio station Non Stop Pop FM, exclusive to those who bought the game on eighth generation consoles.
