Best The Cars Song

The Cars arrived in 1978 sounding like they had already been figured out. The debut got played end to end on Boston radio before it had time to become a cult record, and every song on it is on the ballot here because there is no filler to cut. Ric Ocasek wrote almost all of this and sang most of it, but the ones people name first are usually the ones Ben Orr sang, and that split runs through the whole bracket.

The synths are the reason these matchups get strange. Greg Hawkes plays keyboards the way a lead guitarist would, so Moving in Stereo and Touch and Go are competing against songs like My Best Friend's Girl, which is basically a rockabilly record with handclaps. Elliot Easton's solos are short enough that they never turn into the point, which is why the guitar songs and the machine songs sit in the same catalog without fighting.

Then MTV happened and the band turned out to be built for it. You Might Think won the first Video of the Year award, Andy Warhol directed Hello Again, and Drive became the song that plays over the famine film at Live Aid. Those five Heartbeat City singles have a reach the album tracks never got, and picking between them and something like Dangerous Type is the actual fight this bracket exists for.

Every candidate plays. The MTV-era singles are the official videos, the rest are the label's own uploads of the album masters, so what you hear is the version on the record.