Rustbucket

Album: One Bad Son (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • Formed in 2004, Rustbucket is a Canadian rock band that signed to 604 Records in 2010. That label is owned by Chad Kroeger of Nickelback, and leans toward pop acts like Carly Rae Jepsen. This worked to the band's advantage, as 604 gave them plenty of creative control for their self-titled debut album, released in 2012. Lead singer Shane Volk told Songfacts: "The very cool thing about the label is that because we're very much outside of what they have and had going on, they basically took an approach with us where they were like, Look, you guys know your sound, you know what you're writing, so just keep doing it."
  • As Neil Young pointed out, rust never sleeps. It does, however, eat away at its host, eventually rendering it worthless. Shane Volk told Songfacts that childhood memories of rusted farm equipment inspired the title. Said Volk: "I'm a farm kid, myself. And you would see these old pieces of machinery and old vehicles, and I was thinking of this one old truck that we have on our farm that's really rusted and really grown into the ground, almost. And you get that feeling of like, man, if I sit here any longer, I'm going to just be a part of this place and I'll be forgotten.

    So that's really the driving thing, it was like it's now or never. So that title came out as 'Rustbucket,' just being, I'm going to be just an old truck in somebody's yard."
  • Lead singer Shane Volk is a cinephile - another song on the album, "True Grit," was inspired by a John Wayne movie. "Rustbucket" was partly inspired by The Wizard of Oz, and specifically the Tin Man character, who couldn't move after he rusted.

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