One Ton Trolley charges full steam ahead into the album era.

The Clarkston, Michigan roots-rock quartet pays homage to the days of listening to a record in its entirety and becoming immersed in the experience on Sunday Morning Cigarettes.

“I wanted to make a 1970s rock album where you got in on the first song and you rode the thing all the way to the end,” said Bill Arnold, One Ton Trolley’s lead vocalist, guitarist and dobroist, about the band’s latest album.

“I was thinking of pre-car keys Bill laying on the floor of his bedroom reading the liner notes to a record. I wanted it to flow … I’m pretty pleased with the order.”

For Sunday Morning Cigarettes, One Ton Trolley arrives in good order, but not without revisiting old routes to the past. The album’s dozen tracks reflect on previous relationships, choices and lessons from a wiser, clearer perspective.

“I don’t really write about personal experiences as much as I try to write about things that I see or hear,” Arnold said. “I’m like an observer that tries to put them … more in first person.”

From Cigarettes to Gardens

Through that lens, Arnold and his One Ton Trolley bandmates Chris Brown (bass), Jon Johnson (drums) and Anthony Zack (guitar, vocals) share astute lyrics and driving rock instrumentation fused with turbocharged electric guitars.

“I couldn’t be prouder of the guys that I play with. Chris Brown is one of most unsung bass players in this area; he’s just so solid,” said Arnold, who formed the band in late 2017.

“Jon Johnson on drums—I’m still shocked people outside of the blues scene don’t know who he is because he’s just unbelievable. Anthony Zack took 20 months to orchestrate all the guitar parts on this thing.”

That strong orchestration starts with the confrontational title track, which closes the chapter on an exhausting relationship.

Backed by steadfast electric guitar, bass and drums, Arnold sings, “Hey, I’ve gotten over you / Your needlecraft and your fucking cats / And your Sunday morning cigarettes, too / Hey, you know what’s left to do / Take your sanctimonious bullshit / And your Sunday morning cigarettes.”

“It’s about a friend’s wife and watching him go through the end of their relationship. I’ll never forget him saying to me, ‘Bill, I can’t do it anymore; I can’t get away from her. She just wants to fight all the time. On a Sunday morning, I just want to go out to my garage and tinker around with some projects, and she’s out there smoking goddamn cigarettes,’” he said.

“Something resonated with me about [how] the final straw was not having a place to go on a Sunday morning to escape her cigarettes. I could see how that would end it. I started putting in all the other things in there—‘your constant gripes, your rolling eyes, and your Sunday morning cigarettes, too’—and then the explicit first line of the last verse.”

After escaping “Sunday Morning Cigarettes,” One Ton Trolley faces the repercussions of miscommunication on “Words.” Alongside fierce electric guitar Arnold sings, “Words … are the ending of old friends / Or the glue that bonds together their amends / Words … are the concrete paths we make / Or the bridges that we only know to break.”

“It’s when you’re trying to say the right thing and no matter what you say, it’s always interpreted wrong. It came from texting a lot because I had a few friends at the time that just took every message [that I sent] … they just got it wrong,” he said.

“There was some animosity or they read something into it. I remember saying to one, ‘Listen, if you’re not going to call me on the phone, we’re not gonna converse.’ You don’t always have control over how people are going to interpret your communication.”

Next, One Ton Trolley returns to the past on “My Town,” a sentimental ballad about accepting the stagnation of your hometown.

Accompanied by melancholic dobro, Arnold sings, “Seems the names are the same up on that old water tower / Jersey numbers to match as far as I can remember / Those Friday nights were made for those of us who would scatter / Leave the others to cheers while we attended to what mattered.”

“The imagery of ‘My Town’ comes from somebody sitting in their car watching the surroundings … and then you start noticing things,” said Arnold, who grew up in Milford. “The water tower is the powerful image of the song, and when I came up over this hill five or six years ago … I saw that water tower, and I’d forgotten about it, but all the names and the numbers were up there.”

Once One Ton Trolley leaves “My Town,” the band explores the grief and heartache from a loss on “Ghost Garden.” Somber pedal steel comforts Arnold as he sings, “Gone is all the wood and stone / All the things that build a home / But hidden in the weeds / Are the treasures that your heart had sewn.”

“It took months for me to write ‘Ghost Garden.’ Every time I grabbed a guitar, I was like, ‘Is this ‘Ghost Garden?’” And it never was until one day I was like, ‘What if I just write this from somebody else’s perspective?’ That’s when it ended up being about a guy who had lost his wife … and he couldn’t face it, so he’d go out drinking,” he said.

“That’s the only time he could drive by where their house used to be at night, so he didn’t have to see it. On a whim one day, he drove by in the daylight and saw those flowers that his wife had planted decades ago still growing.”

As “Ghost Garden” germinated, the band added fruitful collaborations with Larry Labeck (pedal steel) and Ashley Pyle (vocals).

“I had the producing vision of having Ashley just do the harmonies toward the end of the song. I wanted it to be the voice of the dead wife from on high … even the effects and the way Jake [Shives] mixed it, it’s not where we are; it’s from a different place,” Arnold said.

“[Ashley] totally nailed it. She came into the studio and was like, ‘Do you guys mind if I just sing through the whole thing? I worked up stuff for the whole song.’ It was unbelievable … it changed the song. I was like, ‘Jake, hang on to this stuff because I want to release this as a separate acoustic single later with her through the whole thing.’”

The band plans to release that single along with a response song from Pyle about the “late wife” featured in “Ghost Garden” called “In the Garden.”

Sunday Morning Cigarettes and Beyond

To bring Sunday Morning Cigarettes to life, One Ton Trolley spent two years crafting the album with engineer/co-producer Jake Shives at Ferndale’s Tempermill Studio. The band had previously worked with Shives on their 2022 debut EP, No Simple Highways.

“We had a lot of conversations about how we wanted to do it and the time frame. I was like, ‘I’m less concerned about this being a time-frame thing and more about getting it done right.’ I was all about working with Jake because I knew he understood our sound,” said Arnold, who co-produced the album with Shives and sought inspiration from Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin.

“Honestly, I couldn’t have scripted it better given everything that was going on in the world. If we had put this record out before COVID, it would have been forgotten by now.”

The album also features memorable collaborations with Shives (Mellotron, organ) and Slowfoot’s Peter Zajicek (Hammond B3 organ).

“Pete’s on three tracks on Sunday Morning Cigarettes, and he’s got a really good setup; a lot of it’s about his transmission with foot pedals that control the Leslie speaker,” Arnold said. “He’s probably got one of the best rigs around.”

Today, the band continues to promote the album through ongoing live shows, including Aug. 23 at Walled Lake’s Hiram Sims Park; Aug. 24 at The Whitney in Detroit; Aug. 30 at Lake Orion’s Children’s Park in Lake Orion; Sept. 16 for LO Palzooa at Lake Orion’s Wildwood Amphitheater, Sept. 23 at South Lyon’s Third Monk Brewing Company; Oct. 1 at Taste of Clarkston in Clarkston and Nov. 11 at Holla Holler in Irvine, Kentucky.

“It’s more than just the musicians that make the whole scene: It’s the venues, it’s the sound people, it’s the writers, it’s the radio people, it’s the podcast people, it’s everybody to make it work. Most importantly, it’s the people who come to see these shows,” Arnold said.

“We’re all fortunate that we have a few people that come to see the majority of our shows, but we’re always trying to grow that. I love seeing the collaboration with and the support for other bands and genuinely encouraging them to share fans with each other.”

Looking ahead, One Ton Trolley plans to record several tracks at Tempermill for a series of new singles.

“[We’re] not going to do another album like this per se anytime soon,” Arnold said. “We’re going to block off a weekend at the Tempermill, and we’ll lay tracks down for three, four or five songs. We’re just going to release singles for a while because then we can really focus on that one song.”

For booking inquiries, contact One Ton Trolley at booking@onetontrolley.com.