Kornhaber: That song makes me think of an amusement park, too. It might be the keyboards. What do you make of them?
Newman: I love the simplicity of it. Greg Hawkes seemed like he rarely ever played chords. He just played these cool keyboard lines. That’s another thing The New Pornographers stole. Let’s take their syncopated groove and their cool, monophonic synthesizer sound.
“Touch and Go” (1980)
Newman: It was really the only hit from Panorama. It has a very interesting, off-kilter beat. It’s got a keyboard playing pretty straight quarter or eighth notes through it. The bass line is minimal and experimental. Then once you get to the chorus it becomes like a Buddy Holly song. It’s The Cars taking it too far.
Panorama is the first album where people were going, “I’m not too sure about what you’re doing here, Cars,” but “Touch and Go” worked very well. I remember when “Shake It Up” came out [in 1981], going like, “Oh, I’m glad that this is a hit. The Cars are back.”
Kornhaber: Every band has that album that tests their popularity.
Newman: Yeah, but they only had one out of five! And they were putting out records so quickly that it didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you have a massive hit in ’79 but then you have a middling album in 1980 and then you’re back on top in 1981. Who cares?
“’Since You’re Gone” (1981)
Newman: I love the weird intro to that song. It opens up into more of a pop song, but in the beginning it’s kind of brooding. That’s a cool move for a pop band in 1981. I really love the Ric Ocasek vocal delivery where he goes, “I can’t HELP it!” He does this great pseudo–new wave Bob Dylan thing.
He was such a strange rock star. When you’re 10 years old and you’re seeing a band, you’re not thinking, “What should a rock star look like?” It made me think a rock star can be this tall, weird, gangly guy. Even though [The Cars’ bassist] Benjamin Orr sang most of the hits and he was the pretty boy, it was Ric Ocasek who jumped out more. Later, when I decided I wanted to play music, I would look at these bands that didn’t really look like rock stars, and that would inspire me: Hüsker Dü in 1984 or R.E.M. during Murmur. You don’t have to look a certain way. You can create your own cool.
[After The Cars], you started to see these rock stars that were kind of weird looking! It was almost as if major labels were looking for these guys. You had Joe Jackson. Or Donnie Iris. Or Moon Martin. Are people actually looking for these weird guys with glasses and bowl cuts? Or are these guys trying to look like this purposefully because they want to look like The Cars?
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