“Moving in Stereo” – The Cars
(Words/music: Greg Hawkes and Ric Ocasek, available on The Cars, Elektra Records 1978)

So over the weekend I upgraded my computer’s speakers (which by my estimate, were four times older than my actual computer) to a modest yet fancy (and relatively cheap) 5.1 setup.  I remember when I got the other set of speakers, including the first subwoofer I ever had, I played Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” and was nearly blown back by the sound rattling my computer chair.  This time, perhaps because I mentioned it in a post last week, I wanted to play “Moving in Stereo” to hear how the multi speaker setup sounded.  Whenever I think about “Moving in Stereo,” I think of a specific time in high school driving a friend home.  It was late at night and foggy, and as I was trying to retrace my steps out of an unfamiliar neighborhood in a neighboring town, the local radio station went silent for ten seconds, followed by their weekly test of the Emergency Broadcast System.  The silence followed by the distinctive piercing sound threw me off guard, but the DJ must have had a sense of humor, or at least a sense of the moment, by coming out of the EBS test and several seconds of silence with “Moving in Stereo.”  It was the first time I heard “Moving in Stereo” and paid attention to it, so I wasn’t prepared for bassist Benjamin Orr’s creepy vocals swirling around me.  With the rolling fog and eerie suburban silence as a backdrop, it almost made me feel like The Cars were haunting me.  Almost.

Still, while I immediately think of those vocals as the benign ghost of synthpop’s past, the signature keyboard part stands out even more.  If, like today, I think about the way Orr sings the word “tremolo” before listening to the song, I’m walking around whistling the melody from the keys.  As a melodic phrase, this line works because it doesn’t try to do too much.  Instead, the melody moves at the same deliberate pace as the rest of the song while still cutting through the strange ambient noises in the background.  It’s a tribute to Ric Ocasek’s commitment to efficient and effective arrangement both in his songwriting and later on in his production work.  While others might have drenched the song in eerie sounding synthesizers, Ocasek and keyboard player Greg Hawkes rely on a sort of musical agoraphobia, letting the open spaces in the arrangement linger just long enough to fall on the creepy side without becoming uncomfortably oppressive.  While many of you associate “Moving in Stereo” with Phoebe Cates moving in slow motion (and who would blame you?), I can’t shake that odd, dark moment where The Cars creeped the hell out of me.

More on The Cars: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm