“Bye Bye Love” by The Cars

"Bye Bye Love" turns up on the Cars' debut album The Cars, put out by Elektra in 1978, but it was already an old tune by then. Ric Ocasek wrote it back in the mid-'70s, when he, Benjamin Orr and guitarist Elliot Easton were still playing as Cap'n Swing, and that outfit demoed it with a keyboard hook quite unlike the one on the record.

Ocasek handed the lead vocal to Orr, the band's bassist, whose cool croon glides over a clipped, herky-jerky beat while producer Roy Thomas Baker and engineer Geoff Workman buff everything to a hard new wave gleam. Rolling Stone's Kit Rachlis counted it among the album's harsher, more angular moments, and it does bray. It was never a single, yet radio has kept spinning it ever since, and it later surfaced in the 2011 film Super 8.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.