''Niagara Falls'' is the first solo album released by

Greg Hawkes Gregory A. Hawkes (born October 22, 1952) is an American musician best known as the keyboardist for the rock band The Cars. Hawkes, a native of Fulton, Maryland, United States, attended Atholton High School where he played in a band called Teet ...

, best known as an original member of

the Cars The Cars were an American rock band formed in Boston in 1976. Emerging from the new wave scene in the late 1970s, they consisted of Ric Ocasek ( rhythm guitar), Benjamin Orr (bass guitar), Elliot Easton (lead guitar), Greg Hawkes ( keyboard ...

. It was released in 1983 by Passport Records. Hawkes plays all instruments (with one exception—see below), with programmed drums and multiple layers of keyboard parts, as well as rhythm guitar. It was recorded at Syncro Sound, then The Cars's private recording studio. Tuneful and not overly experimental, it sounds (despite the instrumental nature of the material) very much like the ''

Shake It Up Shake It Up may refer to: * ''Shake It Up'' (Boney James & Rick Braun album), 2000 * ''Shake It Up'' (The Cars album), 1981 ** "Shake It Up" (The Cars song), the title song * "Shake It Up" (Divine song), 1983 * "Shake It Up" (Koda Kumi song), ...

'' era of The Cars. "Jet Lag" and "Voyage Into Space" are the only tunes to feature lyrics: ''"Jet lag / It's a real drag"'' and ''"Voyage into space / Check out some other place"''—sometimes processed through a

vocoder A vocoder (, a portmanteau of ''voice'' and ''encoder'') is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation. The vocoder was ...

. "Voyage Into Space" also features the artist's wife, Elaine Hawkes, on flute. Hawkes would not release another solo album for 25 years. His second solo album, though also instrumental, was very different in sound than this, his first: ''The Beatles Uke'' (2005) featured Hawkes playing instrumental versions of Beatles songs on the

ukulele The ukulele ( ; from haw, ukulele , approximately ), also called Uke, is a member of the lute family of instruments of Portuguese origin and popularized in Hawaii. It generally employs four nylon strings. The tone and volume of the instrumen ...

Track listing

# "Niagara Falls" (3:42) # "Twenty-Seven Shirts" (3:55) # "Ants in Your Pants" (3:12) # "Llamas" (1:55) # "The Missing Link" (1:50) # "Block Party" (3:53) # "Jet Lag" (3:00) # "Beep Beep" (1:41) # "Bee System" (4:31) # "Voyage into Space" (3:34) # "Let There Be Lights" (3:54)

Personnel

– keyboards, drum machine, guitar, occasional vocals, noises, design * Elaine Hawkes – additional flute (10) * David Heglmeier, Roger Merritt – assistant engineers * Walter Turbitt – recording and mixing engineer * Thom Moore – recording engineer * Elliot Roberts, Steve Berkowitz – management *

Greg Calbi Gregory Calbi (born April 3, 1949) is an American mastering engineer at Sterling Sound, New Jersey. Biography Greg Calbi was born on April 3, 1949, in Yonkers, New York, and raised in Bayside, Queens, New York. He graduated in 1966 from Bishop ...

– mastering

References

{{Authority control 1983 albums Greg Hawkes albums Passport Records albums