“Good Times Roll” by The Cars

The Cars' 1978 debut, The Cars, had sleek hooks to spare, but "Good Times Roll" is the one wearing a smirk. Ric Ocasek wrote and sang it as a put-on, a sideways look at what rock and roll's famous good times actually add up to, and he delivers it with a deadpan cool that makes the whole party sound faintly absurd. The beat struts in slow and deliberate, the guitars chop and hold back, and nobody seems in a hurry to have fun.

Roy Thomas Baker produced it for Elektra and stacked the backing vocals into gleaming layers, with Geoff Workman engineering, so the sarcasm comes wrapped in chrome. It went out as the album's third single in 1979, and it has kept turning up on the band's compilations ever since.

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