I am rolling

In 1988, when I was around five, my parents bought a Volvo 740 GLE. At that age, I didn’t really understand what it meant to buy a car. But I remember the excitement in the family when we went to the car dealer to pick it up.

Inside the car, tucked into a small compartment in between both front seats, there was a white cassette tape with the words “I AM ROLLING” above a picture of a Volvo ÖV 4 reflecting a 700 series model below it.

It turned out, Volvo Car Corporation had commissioned a music album to celebrate their sixty years of making cars¹, and they included a copy with every new car sold. It contained thirteen tracks blending pop with other styles, including jazz, calypso, rock and country.

I fell in love with it.

Although beautifully arranged and crafted, musically speaking it was clearly marketing oriented. It surely won’t go into the annals of music history. And yet, I always wanted to listen to it because, even at that young age, it awakened something inside me that I couldn’t really describe, but felt wonderful.

I guess it’s the same reason why I also listened to a vinyl of Europe’s The Final Countdown that my sister had, while playing air guitar with an old tennis racket. To this day, I still wonder why no one in my family noticed that I had a thing for music. I guess I’ll never know.

My favourite song on the Volvo album was the homonymous “I am rolling”, which I still consider a textbook example of how to compose a 1980s pop song.

Following the verse-chorus form and interpreted by a duet, it opens on a quiet, almost mysterious vibe, with just one of the singers and some ambient synthesizers.

With the second verse, the song starts to build up, introducing a drum machine, a bass synth and subtle embellishments with an arpeggiator. And finally, it resolves into a powerful and catchy chorus, with even more synthesizers (hey, it was the 1980s) and the voices creating a beautiful harmony.

The same structure is repeated once before making a key change from F♯m to Am, followed by a simple but effective electric guitar solo that mimics the melody in the chorus. Then it goes back to F♯m to repeat the chorus a few more times, before going up to Am again for a final repetition that ends the song.

That Volvo was the first car I ever drove. Some years after we bought it, when I was still a child but tall enough to reach the pedals, my dad put me in the driver’s seat and allowed me to drive it in an empty car park. That planted the seed of my interest in cars, but that’s a story for another day.