The latest in a recent flurry of musician deaths is Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, who died at home in New York this past weekend while recovering from surgery. Tributes are starting to pour in — including two we published yesterday at Stereogum from Tom Breihan and Annie Zaleski — and last night on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert offered another.

Colbert had a working relationship with Ocasek dating back to his days hosting The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. But as he explained in a short monologue last night, Colbert’s personal sense of connection to Ocasek runs much deeper than that. He called the Cars “the soundtrack of my high school” and dubbed the band’s self-titled album one of “the greatest debut pop albums of all time” alongside Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True. And he shared this anecdote about spotting Ocasek during a trip to New York: “I was just visiting some friends in college. I was down in Greenwich Village, getting a cup of coffee, sitting on the sidewalk, and Ric fucking Ocasek walked by! And I went, ‘I have to move here. Ric Ocasek lives here?'”

Colbert went on to say how happy he was when Ocasek first guested on The Colbert Report. “And then he started doing bits on the show. We would send him out to do, like, commando raids for us.” It’s a brief but heartfelt appreciation for a guy whose music clearly meant a lot to Colbert. Watch it below.