The Cars to Release New Music With Ric Ocasek Vocals

Because “Now and Then” can’t have all of the fun, the three surviving members of the Cars have spent several years recording and fine-tuning “more than two dozen songs” that were in Ric Ocasek’s vault when he died in 2019. The songs, according to Bill Janovitz’s new book, The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told, come from several decades of Ocasek’s career and could take the form of a new Cars album. Keyboardist Greg Hawkes, guitarist Elliot Easton, and drummer David Robinson have all contributed to the songs, which were entrusted to Hawkes from a close friend of Ocasek’s.

“Some sound more like classic Cars than others,” Janovitz writes. One track, “Can’t Stop the Rain,” was written around the Candy-O sessions and discarded, while another, the ballad “I Just Can’t Say,” predates the band’s formation and features vocals from co–front man Benjamin Orr, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2000. Two others, “Crossing the Line” and “Crazy Over You,” are described as “loungey numbers” that Ocasek experimented with for a jazz standards album that never came to fruition. “They were all optimistic that disagreements about Cars business,” Janovitz adds, “would not get in the way of giving their fans unheard Cars music.” You might think they’re crazy, but, well, all they want is to get a release date.