Rolling Boxcar International explores serious themes on new release
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Rolling Boxcar International is a band, but just as importantly, it's a group of friends, Richard Blair said.
"We all say that if our band were to cease to exist, we would stay friends," Blair said. "That’s paramount to all of it."
The band -- Blair, Angelo LaMarca, Tony Nigro and Michael Estok -- deals with some of the issues longtime friends help each other through on its fifth album, simply titled "Rolling Boxcar International.
Those themes are reflected in the opening words to the lead track, "Maybe (It's You)" -- "The road to the best things is often through the hard things."
Blair said some of his first conversations with Estok, who owns Court Street Recording where RBI makes its album and has become a member of the band, were about loss. He and LaMarca, his creative partner since the band started, have talked about those issues for years. Nigro has been a friend for decades.
"If you stick around long enough in life, you’re going to experience grief, but there’s certainly hope, even within that," Blair said. "I think that's one of the themes of this record."
Blair, who wrote seven of the album's eight songs, said noticed those themes emerging in some of the songs he was writing, but he also referenced the 2025 Bruce Springsteen biofilm "Deliver Me from Nowhere," which focused on his life in the early '80s. At the same time Springsteen was writing dark, stark songs that became "Nebraska," he also wrote some of the songs that were part of his multi–platinum mainstream smash "Born in the USA."
The songs on "Rolling Boxcar International" were written at the same time as the band's last album "Buffalo," and the output from Blair and LaMarca was directed to the album where those songs fit best.
"They (the songs) start to relate to one another," Blair said. "A song like 'Buffalo' doesn’t necessarily go with a song like 'Far from Me.' Those are two very different songs, and both thematically and musically
"The first single that we put out, “We Thought You Died, is a song that Angelo wrote, and that song’s been around for a while. We performed that live for a couple of years before we even went and recorded it. And when we did record it, it took a little different shape than when we had been performing it (to fit the record)."
Having recorded several albums now, a level of trust has developed among the musicians as well as a willingness to experiment.
One of Estok's favorite phrases in the studio is, "You can’t mute it if you don’t record it," Blair said. "There’s so much material that we’ll record that just never makes it to the final mix, for any number of reasons. But we try a lot of different things."
The album was released to streaming services earlier this month. A vinyl edition is coming, but a date hasn't been set. Blair said last week he still was waiting for the test pressing.
An album release show hasn't been planned, but the band will playing some of the material when it performs with OHAYO, McConnell, Vitullo & Choe and Leo D'Angelo for a Rock Bottom Concerts event at Penguin City Brewing Company on Nov. 7 and when RBI opens for The Vindys on Nov. 28, also at Penguin City.
The band is in the talking stages of trying to do something bigger for the album in 2027, something that would showcase its sound.
"This new album is pretty lush," Blair said. "There’s some string parts. There’s some really interesting harmonies. Michael is such a Brian Wilson fan, and if you listen to some of the harmony parts, you'll say, 'Oh yeah, that makes sense' ... We’re kind of keeping our options open."