“Maybe that’s you / Maybe that’s me / Maybe that’s all human beings,” go the lyrics of the opening song of Rolling Boxcar International’s newest album, titled eponymously. But the title of the song is shortened to just the first of the epiphany: “Maybe (It’s You)”. Isolating that phrase as the title indicates that the point of the practice was to denote just how removed you feel from the world when something like grief thrusts itself into your life. Yet the actual full scope of the lyrics points to a more communal experience, as if it is saying, “I reckon that’s how everybody in a similar position would feel.” Pertaining to being faced with the inevitability of death, when he says, “There is sound and fury / But mostly sound,” besides being a reference to the William Faulkner novel of the same name, he is trying to articulate that the wretchedness of the process of grieving – the crying, the screaming, the blame, the regret – registers as sheer noise because it is so cloying. It is an outward expression rather than a silent seething. Sonically, the song is reminiscent of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” by Dylan, which is apt for a song that is deconstructing the panorama of nascent grief with a flippant kind of sluggishness.
The album in its entirety is structured in a way that unwraps the full stretch of the path of grieving, standing up. A road that is “littered with lies and truth,” as he says on the next song.
“Field of Blood,” which is the second song, starts out sounding like a folksy alternative track similar to Sparklehorse and then twists into a sound that would conjure up the sonic atmosphere of a collaboration between Wilco and The Shins. “A field of blood is all in the world that we own.” This could be a reference to the field full of blood that a character, a rabbit, sees a vision of in the book, Watership Down. He then cautions the rest of his warren about it plausibly wiping out their home. On this song, this home is gone. It is now just a field of blood. At least, that is how he sees it. And this being his belief about existence is even more devastating than it being true.
Then come “We Thought You Died” and “Far From Me,” the first being a piano ballad, redolent of Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Tori Amos, the second containing a The Flaming Lips sounding instrumentation (The “Hear It Is” era), with the note of foreboding and the quiet tension that is pervasive on it. “What doesn’t kill you / Makes you perpetually wonder why,” as evidenced by the words, “We Thought You Died,” is a song of questioning and asking questions. “Who will lead us?” he asks. “How long must I wait?” he wonders. This is the anticipative sense of doom. “We do our best / Though we don’t know how good that is,” he admits on “Far From Me,” which comes after doom has shifted to gloom. “Time has only made us old” is a statement that flouts the notion that time makes you heal or that time makes you wise. In his case, time has only made him old. Time is not some miracle that fixes everything; it is a measure of your weakening ability to know what to do with yourself. It is a prophecy of disaster. It is a chance to reel from catastrophe. The passage of time is somehow both an omen and a reminder.
You hear a splash of Wilco, a pinch of Counting Crows, and trickles of Van Morrison on the next song, “I’m Out West.” “The weeping cleared out the cobwebs,” he realizes. The process of grieving is smoothing out, but then he says, “I’m not here,” which shows that he is still somewhat tangled in those webs, imagining himself to be out west inside of this glass house of mourning from the outside of which people offer “empty words and platitudes.”
“Me at the Half-Moon” and “Dying is Easy,” you hear, “Today the beauty is / Incomplete,” and “In a constant state of creating / We hope to understand,” these are the mark of the purpose of making this record. You might not know what is going on, but you go on. The beauty that you used to see in the world is lacking, yes, but it is still there in fragments. And so, you create, and you create anything and everything because that is a different kind of expression that actually helps. This is not the sound from the sound and fury from before. This is the sound you are making. This is a song. This is you singing again after not having done it since the loss. The world has lost some of its shine, you have lost some of your hope, but there is still plenty to go around.
“Amidst all the tears / You step forth with a sword,” he says on “Finale,” the last song of the record. He then calls hope a swift thing, like the blade of a sword that pierces the air as a bird carries it over to you. You are no longer waiting for miracles, but you do wait for that messenger bird.
“Those of us who remain / Won’t grieve without hope,” this ends the album. Throughout the record, there is a motif of music and singing dipping in and out of life after a loss so big that it leaves no room for anything else. Memories of singing, singing at the funeral, singing to create something that fills the gaps of the beauty you used to find in the world. You lose the urge to sin,g and then it comes back. And that is how you remember why you used to buy into the fact that time can heal things. Time turns grief into the recovery of mundanity and then to hope for tomorrow. Because it passes, and it takes everything along with it. Even you.
Written by Leo August
