Niagara Falls is the first solo album released by Greg Hawkes

Greg Hawkes

Greg Hawkes is a musician best known as the keyboardist for the Rock band The Cars.Hawkes, a native of Fulton, Maryland, attended Atholton High School where he played in a band called Teeth. He then attended Berklee College of Music for two years, majoring in composition and flute...

, best known as an original member of The Cars

The Cars

The Cars are an American rock band that emerged from the early New Wave music scene in the late 1970s. The band consisted of lead singer and rhythm guitarist Ric Ocasek, lead singer and bassist Benjamin Orr, guitarist Elliot Easton, keyboardist Greg Hawkes and drummer David Robinson...

. 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 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

Vocoder

A vocoder is an analysis/synthesis system, mostly used for speech. In the encoder, the input is passed through a multiband filter, each band is passed through an envelope follower, and the control signals from the envelope followers are communicated to the decoder...

. "Voyage Into Space" also features the artist's wife, Elaine Hawkes, on flute

Flute

The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...

.

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 ukelele.

Track listing

1. "Niagara Falls"
2. "Twenty-Seven Shirts"
3. "Ants in Your Pants"
4. "Llamas"
5. "The Missing Link"
6. "Block Party"
7. "Jet Lag"
8. "Beep Beep"
9. "Bee System"
10. "Voyage into Space"
11. "Let There be Lights"