They were so tight—inseparable—I couldn't imagine Mark didn't know," Barker writes. For DeLonge, he had developed an "itch to do something where he didn't feel locked in to what Blink was." According to DeLonge, Box Car Racer was not "meant to be a real band," but rather "something to do in some spare time that was really only expected to be on the low list of the totem pole of priorities in my life, and just to have an experimental creative outlet." The project was at first solely acoustic guitar-based; he considered it in its earliest stages to be a "Violent Femmes-esque acoustic record". The unnamed project went through other names, such as The Kill, and the album was initially titled Et tu, Brute?. He eventually settled on the name Box Car Racer, which was actually the name of a band Barker was in just after high school that DeLonge liked. He began writing songs about the end of the world, and connected it thematically with the biblical Book of Revelation and World War II. When reading about the war, DeLonge was "freaked out" to learn that Fat Man, the atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, was dropped from the B-29 bomber Bockscar (commonly misspelled Boxcar). Recording and production  Box Car Racer was recorded over six weeks beginning in December 2001, primarily at Signature Sound in San Diego, California. Sessions commenced quickly, with producer Jerry Finn having sent one whole load of equipment to Signature ahead of his arrival.
They were so tight—inseparable—I couldn't imagine Mark didn't know,"Barker writes. For DeLonge, he had developed an"itch to do something where he didn't feel locked in to what Blink was."According to DeLonge, Box Car Racer was not"meant to be a real band,"but rather"something to do in some spare time that was really only expected to be on the low list of the totem pole of priorities in my life, and just to have an experimental creative outlet."The project was at first solely acoustic guitar-based; he considered it in its earliest stages to be a"Violent Femmes-esque acoustic record". The unnamed project went through other names, such as The Kill, and the album was initially titled Et tu, Brute?. He eventually settled on the name Box Car Racer, which was actually the name of a band Barker was in just after high school that DeLonge liked. He began writing songs about the end of the world, and connected it thematically with the biblical Book of Revelation and World War II. When reading about the war, DeLonge was"freaked out" to learn that Fat Man, the atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, was dropped from the B-29 bomber Bockscar (commonly misspelled Boxcar). Recording and production
 Box Car Racer was recorded over six weeks beginning in December 2001, primarily at Signature Sound in San Diego, California. Sessions commenced quickly, with producer Jerry Finn having sent one whole load of equipment to Signature ahead of her arrival.