“Since You're Gone” by The Cars

"Since You're Gone" was the second single pulled from Shake It Up, the Cars' fourth album, released on Elektra with Roy Thomas Baker producing and Ian Taylor engineering. Ric Ocasek wrote it alone, and it's a breakup song cut as a power ballad, though nothing about its shape is ordinary: the verses come out almost chanted before a bridge climbs upward phrase by phrase, and AllMusic's Donald A. Guarisco heard the heartache survive all that oddness.

The words split the critics. Guarisco admired Ocasek's wordplay and the real feeling underneath it, and Jim Bohen singled out his literate wit, while the Boston Globe's Steve Morse found some lines trite. Activist Phyllis Schlafly went further, reading parts of it as encouraging suicide.

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