In February 1984, the Cars released a three-minute single that sounded like a cartoon of a love song — bright, twitchy, and impossibly catchy — and then spent a small fortune turning it into one of the first music videos built with computer graphics. By the end of the year, You Might Think had gone Top 10 in America, topped the rock chart, and beaten Michael Jackson’s Thriller to win Video of the Year at the very first MTV Video Music Awards. It was the spearhead of the most successful album of the Cars’ career.
None of that was the safe bet. The band’s previous album, Shake It Up, had done respectable business, but by 1983 the Cars looked like a group whose moment might be passing. Their response was to change nearly everything: a new producer, a new country, a new way of recording, and a new visual language. You Might Think was where all of it came together.
Leaving Roy Thomas Baker Behind
Every Cars album before this one had been produced by Roy Thomas Baker, the man whose stacked, glossy sound for Queen had defined the band’s records since their 1978 debut. For their fifth album, the Cars broke the habit and hired Robert John “Mutt” Lange — the producer behind AC/DC’s Back in Black and Def Leppard’s Pyromania, and a man famous for treating the recording studio like a laboratory.
Lange’s commitment to the Cars was total. He wanted the album badly enough that he initially told Def Leppard he would not be available for their next record, Hysteria. The sessions he ran were long and exacting, stretching from July 1983 to January 1984 at Battery Studios in Willesden, London. The album that resulted, Heartbeat City, would be greeted as a comeback — a return to the hit-making form of the band’s debut — and You Might Think was chosen to announce it, released a month before the album itself.
Recording to a Click in Willesden
The Battery sessions inverted the way rock bands usually record. Instead of building tracks from the drums up, the Cars laid down keyboards, guitars, and vocals first, working to the steady pulse of a LinnDrum machine, and added the bass and live drums afterward. Drummer David Robinson explained the philosophy: the drums and keyboards were sampled into a Fairlight CMI — the era’s most advanced digital instrument — because the band felt it delivered “a much better, cleaner, more controllable sound.”
You can hear that method all over You Might Think. The song is built on a chirping, mechanical keyboard figure played by Greg Hawkes on the Fairlight, with the band locking in around it like parts of a brightly painted machine. Nothing sounds loose or accidental; every handclap-tight rhythm and stacked backing vocal — Lange himself sang among them — sits exactly where the producer wanted it.
Ric Ocasek, who wrote the song and sang lead (taking this one himself rather than handing it to bassist Benjamin Orr, the band’s balladeer), built the lyric as a joke at the narrator’s expense. The singer is hopelessly, delusionally smitten — convinced a woman who barely notices him is the center of the universe — and Ocasek delivers the obsession with a wink rather than a snarl. It is a stalker serenade played as vaudeville, and its cheerfulness is the point: the music’s shiny machinery wraps around a delusion, and both sound delighted about it.
Three Minutes and an $80,000 Video
If the record showed how far the Cars would go for a sound, the video showed how far they would go for an image. Director Jeff Stein — who had made the Who’s film The Kids Are Alright — connected the band with Charlex, a New York effects house famous for its National Enquirer television commercials. Charlex worked with the Quantel Paintbox, a pioneering tool that let artists draw directly onto the video screen, and the You Might Think clip became one of the first music videos to use computer graphics extensively.
The result is a three-minute surrealist chase. Ocasek pursues model Susan Gallagher through a series of digital gags: he appears in her bathroom mirror, surfaces in her bathtub inside a periscope, turns up inside her mouth while bandmate Greg Hawkes plays a dentist jackhammering her tooth, and transforms into both a housefly and King Kong atop the Empire State Building, with the rest of the band circling him in little planes. One scene drops the band into a cinema showing the 1953 B-movie Robot Monster, with Ocasek becoming the monster.
The production cost roughly $80,000 — nearly three times the average music-video budget of the day. It was, in every sense, a gamble: that a funny, effects-drenched cartoon could carry a single further than radio alone.
Number Seven, Number One, and a Moonman
The gamble paid off on every chart that mattered. You Might Think reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 8 in Canada, and it became the first Cars song ever to top Billboard‘s Mainstream Rock chart. Britain, oddly, shrugged — the single stalled at No. 88 there — but in America the parent album was a phenomenon: Heartbeat City peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, went quadruple platinum, and spun off six singles, including the Top 10 ballad Drive and the hit Magic.
Then came the coronation. On September 14, 1984, MTV held its first Video Music Awards, and You Might Think won the night’s top prize, Video of the Year — ahead of Thriller — along with five further nominations. It also swept five prizes at Billboard‘s 1984 Video Music Awards, including Best Video and Best Special Effects. A song about a man who might think he’s in love had become the defining artifact of the video age’s first year.
Nor was it a lone spike. Heartbeat City kept generating hits for more than a year — Magic followed it into the Top 20, Drive became the band’s biggest American single at No. 3, and even Hello Again arrived with a video directed by Andy Warhol, who appeared in it. The album was less a comeback than a conquest, and You Might Think, its first emissary, had set the terms: state-of-the-art production, a melody that lodged in the brain on first contact, and images no one had ever seen on a television screen before.
The video’s influence ran deeper than its trophies. In 1984, computer graphics in pop were a novelty act; Charlex’s Paintbox wizardry showed an entire industry what was coming. Within a few years, digitally manipulated imagery would be the default language of the music video. The Cars — a band of supposedly cold, detached modernists — had accidentally helped invent it, by treating a three-minute cartoon with the same perfectionism Lange brought to a drum sound.
The Song That Wouldn’t Sit Still
You Might Think never really left. When the Cars played Live Aid in Philadelphia in July 1985, it stood in a set drawn mostly from Heartbeat City, proof of how completely the album had restored them. A generation later, Weezer — a band Ocasek had produced to stardom with their Blue Album — covered the song for the Cars 2 soundtrack in 2011, a neat closing of a circle.
The most poignant return came in April 2018, when the Cars were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and performed You Might Think with Weezer’s Scott Shriner sitting in on bass for the late Benjamin Orr. It was the band’s final performance with Ocasek, who died the following year.
That is the strange double life of You Might Think: a song assembled from drum machines, samples, and computer cartoons that somehow kept acquiring human weight. The Cars made it to prove they still belonged in 1984. It ended up as the record of the moment they were honored for all time — the deluded little love song that out-computed, out-charmed, and outlasted nearly everything around it.
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