A band that already knew who it was
By 1984, The Cars already knew who they were, and so did their audience. Formed in Boston in the late 1970s by Ric Ocasek, Benjamin Orr, Elliot Easton, Greg Hawkes and David Robinson, they had made a series of albums that combined new-wave energy, power-pop melody, and art-rock sophistication in a way that was unmistakably theirs. Ocasek’s dry, detached vocals, Orr’s warmer bass-vocal, Easton’s concise guitar solos, Hawkes’ synthesizers, and Robinson’s precise drumming created a sound that was both futuristic and classic, and songs like “Just What I Needed”, “My Best Friend’s Girl”, “Good Times Roll”, “Let’s Go” and “Shake It Up” had made them one of America’s most successful bands. Yet Heartbeat City, their fifth album, released in March 1984, was different, and it became their biggest-selling record. The difference had a name: Robert John “Mutt” Lange.
Lange, by 1984, was already one of the most sought-after producers in rock, having worked with AC/DC, Def Leppard, and Foreigner, and his reputation was for perfectionism, patience, and a willingness to spend months in the studio chasing a sound. The Cars, who had previously worked with producer Roy Thomas Baker, were a band that valued precision themselves, but Lange took that precision to a new level. The Heartbeat City sessions, recorded in London and elsewhere, were long, meticulous, and, by the band’s own later accounts, sometimes tense. Lange would ask for take after take, he would rework arrangements, and he would insist on details that other producers might have let pass. The result, however, was an album that sounds, even today, like the definitive Cars record: clean, bright, and perfect in a way that their earlier, rawer albums were not.
Drive, Magic, and the singles that defined 1984
Heartbeat City produced five hit singles, an extraordinary return for a single album, and each one shows a different side of the band. “You Might Think”, the album’s lead single, is a quintessential Ocasek song, with a catchy chorus, a quirky lyric, and a video that became one of the first great MTV videos, using early computer graphics to place Ocasek’s face in a series of surreal situations. The video won the first MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year in 1984, and it helped make the song a hit. “Magic”, the second single, is another Ocasek track, with a driving beat and a chorus that is as memorable as anything the band had recorded. “Hello Again”, “Why Can’t I Have You”, and “Drive” followed, and together they kept Heartbeat City on the charts for most of 1984.
“Drive”, sung by Benjamin Orr rather than Ocasek, is the album’s most emotional track, and it became its biggest hit. Orr’s voice, warmer and more vulnerable than Ocasek’s, gives the song a tenderness that the band’s earlier work had rarely shown, and its lyric, about caring for someone who is struggling, resonated with listeners in a way that transcended the new-wave context. The song’s video, directed by Timothy Hutton, featured a young woman in a series of stark, emotional scenes, and it became as famous as the song itself. “Drive” reached the top five in America, and it has since become one of The Cars’ most enduring songs, covered and referenced many times, and used in films and television. It is a reminder that, beneath their cool, detached image, The Cars could write songs of real feeling, and that Orr, often overshadowed by Ocasek as a songwriter, was a vital part of the band’s identity.
Mutt Lange’s method
Lange’s method on Heartbeat City is worth describing, because it explains both the album’s sound and its tensions. Lange was known for his attention to vocal harmonies, his use of layered backing vocals, and his insistence on perfect timing. He would have the band record a song, then listen back, then record it again, sometimes with small changes to the arrangement, the tempo, or the vocal phrasing, until he was satisfied. That process could be frustrating for musicians who were used to working more quickly, and the Heartbeat City sessions are remembered, by band members in later interviews, as demanding. Yet the band also acknowledged that Lange’s demands made the album better. The vocal harmonies on Heartbeat City are richer than on earlier Cars albums, the synthesizer textures are more detailed, and the overall sound is more polished, without losing the band’s identity. Lange did not turn The Cars into a different band; he turned them into a more perfect version of themselves.
The album’s title, Heartbeat City, and its cover art, a stylised, futuristic cityscape, also reflect the album’s themes. The Cars had always been a band interested in modern life, in cars, cities, and technology, and Heartbeat City is their most urban album, full of images of streets, lights, and movement. The songs are not conceptually linked in a strict sense, but they share a mood: a sense of living in a modern city, with all its excitement, loneliness, and possibility. That mood, combined with Lange’s production, made the album feel contemporary in 1984, and it has helped it age well. Heartbeat City does not sound like a period piece; it sounds like a record that was made to last, and it has.
The band after Heartbeat City
Heartbeat City was, in commercial terms, the peak of The Cars’ career, and it was also, in a sense, the beginning of the end of the classic line-up. The band toured extensively behind the album, including a performance at Live Aid in 1985, but the tensions that had built up during the recording, combined with Ocasek’s growing interest in solo work, led to a hiatus and then to a breakup in 1988. Ocasek and Orr both pursued solo careers, and the other members worked on their own projects, but none of them quite recaptured the magic of the classic Cars line-up. The band reunited in 2010, without Orr, who had died in 2000, and released a new album, Move Like This, in 2011, which was well received but did not reach the commercial heights of Heartbeat City. Ocasek died in 2019, and the band’s story is now, in the main, a story of a classic line-up that made a series of great records and then stopped, rather than fading away.
That ending has only added to Heartbeat City’s reputation. It is now seen as the album where The Cars, with Lange’s help, achieved everything they had been working towards: perfect pop songs, perfect production, and a sound that was both of its time and timeless. It is also an album that has found new listeners in the streaming era, through its singles, through its influence on later indie and new-wave revival bands, and through the enduring appeal of “Drive”. Young musicians who discover The Cars through “Drive” or “You Might Think” often go on to discover the whole album, and they find, to their surprise, that it holds together as a complete work, not just as a collection of singles.
Listening to Heartbeat City properly
If you listen to Heartbeat City today, start with “Hello Again”, the album’s opening track, and notice how its synthesizer introduction sets the album’s tone at once: bright, modern, and precise. Then listen to “Magic” and “You Might Think” as pop songs, and notice how their choruses are constructed, with backing vocals that lift the lead vocal without overwhelming it. Then listen to “Drive”, and notice the contrast: Orr’s voice, the slower tempo, and the emotional directness that makes the song stand out. Finally, listen to the album as a whole, and notice how Lange’s production gives every track the same clarity and polish, so that the album feels like a single, coherent statement rather than a collection of separate songs. That coherence is Lange’s gift, and it is why Heartbeat City remains, for many listeners, the definitive Cars album.
The Cars were a band that understood the power of a perfect pop song, and Heartbeat City is their most perfect album. It was made by a band that knew its strengths, and a producer who knew how to bring those strengths to their fullest expression, even if the process was difficult. The result is an album that defined 1984, and that still defines, for many people, what new-wave pop can be at its best: clever, catchy, emotional, and impeccably made. That is a legacy any band would be proud of, and it is why Heartbeat City, forty years on, still sounds like it was made yesterday.
The videos, the tour, and Live Aid
Heartbeat City arrived at the height of the MTV era, and its videos were as important to its success as its singles. “You Might Think” remains one of the most celebrated videos of the early MTV years, not only because it won the first Video of the Year award, but because it used computer graphics in a playful, inventive way that had rarely been seen in a pop video. Ocasek’s face appears in a bathroom mirror, in a cinema, and in a series of surreal transformations, all in service of a song about a man trying to impress a woman who is not impressed. The video’s humour matches the song’s humour, and it helped make the song a hit with an audience that was watching music as much as listening to it. “Drive”, by contrast, used a stark, emotional video, directed by the actor Timothy Hutton, that told a small, sad story without the band even appearing for much of its length. The contrast between the two videos shows the band’s range: they could be funny and futuristic, and they could be serious and still, and both approaches worked.
The Heartbeat City tour was one of the biggest of 1984, and it took the band to arenas across America and beyond, with a stage show that matched the album’s polished sound. The band’s live performances in this period were, by most accounts, tight and professional, with Ocasek’s dry stage manner contrasting with Orr’s warmer presence, and with Easton’s guitar solos providing the evening’s moments of flash. The tour also confirmed the band’s status as a stadium act, a long way from the Boston clubs where they had started. Their appearance at Live Aid on 13 July 1985, performing in Philadelphia, was a fitting coda to the Heartbeat City era: a band at the peak of its fame, playing its hits to a global audience, in a concert that was itself a landmark of the MTV era. The Cars’ Live Aid set, which included “You Might Think”, “Drive”, and other hits, was well received, and it remains a document of the band at its most popular.
After Live Aid, the band’s story moved towards its end, but Heartbeat City’s influence did not. The album’s production style, Lange’s layered vocals, its clean synthesizers, and its precise rhythms, became a template for 1980s pop-rock, and its songs have been covered, sampled, and referenced by later artists across genres. “Drive” in particular has had a second life as a song about caring and loss, used in films, in tributes, and in moments of public mourning, including after the death of Benjamin Orr himself. That afterlife is a testament to the song’s emotional directness, which transcends its new-wave origins. A song that was written as a Cars album track, sung by the band’s bass player rather than its main songwriter, has become, for many listeners, the band’s defining song, and that is a fitting tribute to a band that was always, at its best, a collaboration rather than a solo project with a backing group.
A final note on the band’s chemistry: The Cars worked because their members were so different. Ocasek’s dry, detached writing, Orr’s warm and emotional singing, Easton’s concise and melodic guitar solos, Hawkes’ synthesizer textures, and Robinson’s precise drumming each contributed something the others could not, and Lange’s production on Heartbeat City gave each of those contributions its proper place. No single member dominated the album, and that balance is why it still sounds like a band rather than a producer’s project. When Orr sings “Drive”, it is not a guest vocal; it is the sound of a band trusting one of its own to carry its most emotional song, and that trust is audible in every note.
Image credit: New York City at night HDR photograph by Paulo Barcellos Jr., CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (thematic image only, not a photograph of The Cars)
Sources / further reading
- The Cars official history and Heartbeat City album notes
- Contemporary reviews of Heartbeat City, 1984
- Mutt Lange production histories and interviews
- MTV Video Music Awards records, 1984
Leave a Reply