Surviving Cars members reveal they’ve been working on Ric Ocasek’s final songs

Iconic New Wave band The Cars are working on completing music that was made with late frontman, Ric Ocasek.

• READ MORE: The story of new wave in 15 classic albums

The new wave band found swift success with albums like ‘The Cars’ (1978), ‘Candy-O’ (1979) and ‘Heartbeat City’ (1984). The Cars broke up in 1988, but they reunited in 2010 to record an album, ‘Move Like This’ that was released in 2011. They were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. Ocasek passed away a year later in 2019.

Last month, author and Buffalo Tom frontman Bill Janovitz published a biography about the band called The Cars: Let The Stories Be Told. In this, he revealed that some as yet unreleased Cars music could be released in the future.

Janovitz revealed that surviving Cars members Elliot Easton, Greg Hawkes and David Robinson have been working on music that Ocasek started making before he died. The songs were also worked on by late Cars singer and bassist Benjamin Orr too, who died of cancer in 2000. 

Later speaking to Guitar Player, Easton said: “So far there’s five [songs] done now, with guitar overdubs and everything…They sound like Cars songs, they really do. It was really sort of natural to fall back into that world and think, ‘OK, here’s a new Ric song. What do I want to do?’ And it was just kind of the same as before that way.”

As per Stereogum, the band’s manager Jeff Kramer reportedly took the demos to Ocasek’s bandmates in 2020 and they’ve been working on them ever since. 

Easton added: “The songs were presented to us in this extremely skeletal form. Ric would just play his kind of eighth-note style…But without what we did to them, they could’ve ended up just on a cassette sitting in a drawer. 

“I think we turned them into Cars songs – whatever that means. When the five of us got a hold of them and started coming up with lines and hooks and intros and solos and counterpoint melodies and things to add to choruses and stuff, that’s what made them catchy.”

On Sunday (October 26), Easton also took part in a Cars tribute concert in Los Angeles. Those in attendance performed all songs from The Cars’ self-titled 1978 debut. 

• READ MORE:  Ric Ocasek, producer, performer and frontman of The Cars, 1944-2019 – the NME Obituary

Participants included Billy Idol, Slipknot’s Corey Taylor, Nine Inch Nails’ Josh Freese and more. You can see some of the footage from the event above.

The band have been cited as a key influence on many not least Bleachers, the main project of Jack Antonoff. The band shared a live cover The Cars classic 1984 single ‘Drive’ in 2021.

Red Hot Chili Peppers also covered the Cars songs ‘Just What I Needed’ in tribute to Ric Ocasek following his passing. Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus also shared a Cars cover previously, ‘Just What I Needed.’ 

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