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Title track and first single from the album BLACK CARS released on November 30, 1984, with the single hitting #42 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #4 is his native Canada.

In an interview with Toronto's Boom 97.3 radio, Vannelli said: "We had some good success in the 70s and some good success with Nightwalker Records. And then I found myself in trouble because the record company didn't want to put out the things that I wanted to do.

"And so we were at a stalemate and I needed to create anyways. So I had this tune called "Black Cars" but it wasn't yet finished. And I went to a friend of mine who I wrote with sometimes and he said, "Well why don't you just go to Hollywood Boulevard and check out the people walking by?" So I went to Hollywood Boulevard for a few days and there was this lady that kept walking by me that looked like yarrow root on her face.

"And she had this thick makeup and a dark kerchief and a black fur coat, long fur coat, high heels. And she looked to be maybe in her 50s or 60s. And it was the dead of summer in LA and it was about 90 degrees and how she could stand it under that fur coat was amazing to me. In any case, I looked at her and how the sun was hitting the yarrow and her cheekbones and her cracks in her faces. And I said, "I think Black Cars is not about a car at all. It's about this lady." And so thus came, you know, "her skin is cold, china white. She's a dark angel wearing dark glasses, a fading beauty as the nighttime passes". So it was sort of a glorious swan song, and on Sunset Boulevard that, you know, lost her shot. But she was still like a ghost pacing up and down Hollywood Boulevard hoping to be recognized. And that's what the song really is about. It's really not about a car at all. The only linkage to a car was that I could never get my black car to look clean. And that's the only thing that I said, "Well, she's just like my black car." And that's basically the story behind that tune.

"It started off being a guitar song but we just couldn't resist it after the discovery of the DX7 and stuff like that. But my brother and I got into the studio and we just started fooling around with things. And we said, "Whatever we did in the 70s, we won't do for this cut. No live drums." We started really ass-backwards. And that's why it kind of turned out different. We knew that if we approached it differently, the end would be different."