The Company Car Know How to Make an Entrance in ‘The Return Of’
Photo courtesy of The Company Car
On their winkingly titled debut record, The Return Of, The Company Car aren’t newbies. The Nashville-based indie rock band formed in January of 2024 when lead singer and songwriter Beau Williams joined forces with fellow songwriter Andrew Stevenson to craft a patchwork sound inspired by Americana, freak-folk, slacker rock, and the Beatles’ penchant for abstract lyricism. Drummer James Goodwin and bassist Grant Alan rounded out the band’s lineup.
Inspired by the Bluth family's stair car from Arrested Development, they named the band The Company Car. A month later, an actual company car crashed into Beau Williams’ house–– proof that when you put a creative idea out there, it can echo back in unexpected ways. In The Return Of, The Company Car mythologizes life’s inevitable moments of return, from mundane daily routines to recurring emotions and the spiritual concept of afterlives.
“Second Lifetime” starts alongside the sound of a car engine turning over. The listener is buckling up to start their journey on this record while The Company Car returns to the tried-and-true format of the twangy ballad, given a soulful groove with the accent of saxophone and reverby organ chords. “Ways to Fold” paints a picture of an introspective underdog more comfortable with loss than winning—“Lordy do, counted all the ways to lose / cause whatever the cost it doesn’t add up / And folding never did fix my blues.” The track’s slick riffs and catchy chorus evoke a sense of schadenfreude because you’ll want to listen to it again and again despite the down-on-luck lyrics.
“Surface” is a yacht-rock love song created by experiencing noise and silence, and it captures the beauty of both. Songwriter Beau Williams says the chorus came to him after seeing Yo La Tengo play at the Basement East, and the rest of the song materialized during the weekly Quaker meetings he attends with his partner, where the gathered participants sit in silence for an hour in worship. “Barnowls and Hotwheels” is an unusual turn of phrase backed by hauntingly soulful, floating instrumentation that creates a meditative experience, and “The Return Of” twists the band’s sound in a U-turn back to classic rock. “Ubiquity” is a feel-good jam paired with existential questions and personal revelations that would be right at home on a playlist alongside the Grateful Dead. Trippy commentary on historic events? Yup, The Company Car does that too! “Edwards” depicts former politician John Edwards returning to his campaign crime, and swampy synth juxtaposed with speech samples gives the song an unexpectedly earnest edge.
The unofficial theme song of the band, “Unlimited Opportunity,” is a rollicking track that explains the lore of the car crash incident and its surprising lesson in resilience—“It’s a new traffic pattern that you can’t ignore / It takes a lot to get it off your brain / The sound of the crash and then the split of the frame.” If listening to “Unlimited Opportunity” once isn’t enough, The Company Car has also released a 2.0 version. “This is Passing” is a spirited take on legacy and the dark side of nostalgia, echoing the themes from the opening track “Second Lifetime.” Instead of getting dragged down by their soul-searching, The Company Car makes retrospection feel fluid and alive through plucky guitar strumming, bouncy horns, and the light touch of shaking percussion reminiscent of rattling an hourglass. The track is a reminder not to hold on too tightly because by the time you’ve processed the present moment, it’s already in the past.
The Return Of captures the sentiment that even though everything has been done before and we’re repeating the same stories over and over, there’s still magic in each time the old is made new. Overall, the record is a cohesive debut from The Company Car, who expertly pay homage to the classics through their fresh perspective and prove that a good arrangement never goes out of style.
