Box Car Racer
April 28, 2002

A musical side-project for Blink 182’s singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge and drummer Travis Barker, Box Car Racer is in the radio.wazee spotlight this week with "Feel So" from their self-titled debut album on MCA, due due May 14th. The band also features guitarist David Kennedy from punk outfit Over My Dead Body and bassist Anthony Celestino.

In Box Car Racer, which began as DeLonge playing acoustic guitar and has evolved into a full-fledged rock foursome, they play a less poppy, more hardcore flavor of punk. DeLonge writes serious songs they plan to perform at little clubs a few weeks a year, as they did at West Hollywood’s legendary Whisky-A-Go-Go April 3rd.

DeLonge also attributes the album's somber tone to his back problems, which had the singer/guitarist in pain for most of the writing and recording process. "When your back is killing you and you have to have surgery and all this stuff, it's just kind of hard to keep a focus on the happier times in your life," he said. "You end up writing all these songs about feeling sad and confused."

As far as the first single, "Feel So," DeLonge says it’s really just a song about feelings. "It's really just about being a kid," he says. "Not really being a kid, but just about being angry at the world and kind of wishing you were a different way, but you can't be a different way so you feel angry and you feel mad and you feel sad, and that's what's in this song."

The band's name fits that grave atmosphere, although it wasn't intended to. Box Car Racer was actually the name of a band Barker was in just after high school that DeLonge liked. "It's not like Boxcar Racer, like a little fast, speedy car," Barker explained. "It was always meant to be three words, and it was just a name of something that means totally nothing, but Tom's political, so he'll tell you it was the bomb [used on] the Japanese people."

"Revelations in the Bible speaks about the end of the world, and one day I was wondering if World War II was what Revelations spoke about," DeLonge explained. "So I started looking it up, and the second bomb that was dropped on Japan was from a plane called Boxcar (actually Bockscar, but commonly misspelled Boxcar), and it kind of really freaked me out. At that point I didn't even want the name, but it was way too late. I blame Travis for that one."

Contrary to much speculation, DeLonge wants to make clear that Box Car Racer absolutely does not spell the end for Blink-182. "Blink will never break up," says DeLonge. "We love what we do way too much for anything ever to happen to Blink, and we are so blessed by the man upstairs to even have that in our lives. That's our passion. This is just part two of that."