ROCK PLAZA CENTRAL: LIKE THOSE “SLEEVEFACE” THINGS... BUT WITH MONKEYS

So you’ve produced a magnificent conceptual folk-rock album about a race of equine robots (who think they’re real horses, natch), bound up in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. Against all odds, this out-there opus becomes a runaway hit that propels you from drinking buddies who jam at your local to a Pitchfork-acclaimed international touring act. How on earth do you follow that up?

It’s fair to say that question has plagued Chris Eaton, the Toronto-based writer/musician who’s the founder and visionary behind ramshackle folk-rock act Rock Plaza Central, since his band finished riding out the implausible success of their last album, 2006’s Are We Not Horses.

“Panic isn’t the right word,” he says, chuckling slightly. “There are certainly some nerves. The response to Horses was really emotional in a kind of strange way. When we first put it out, we were worried that people would dismiss it as a dumb concept, but they wound up connecting to the songs and taking it to heart way beyond our expectations, saying it helped them through depression and things like that. And so you get nervous — if that record helped folks through hard times, the next one needs to be able to do that too.”

As befits an ambitious young novelist, Eaton turned to great literature for inspiration. While holed up in the van during a tour, he and his bandmates started passing around a copy of William Faulkner’s Light in August, a Depression-era novel which explores racism and classism in the American South. This became the jumping-off point for …at the moment of our most needing (Paper Bag), a darker and more raucous collection of songs that tease out the themes of isolation, existentialism and fruitless quests in Faulkner’s text (as well as drawing inspiration from some of its characters).

“The rigours of being on the road certainly informed it,” says Eaton of the album, which he explains is “a dumb touring record, in a sense. I’m trying to figure out what in my life makes me happy.”

Before they released Horses, Rock Plaza Central were pals who gathered at the Tranzac to raise a beer or two while playing their tunes. Now they’re older and wiser, though they’ve lost some multi-instrumentalist comrades along the way: Rob Carson has moved to the States to pursue a career as a professor; and John Whytock bowed out to spend more time with his kid. The two will rejoin RPC for an upcoming weekend in Philadelphia but, as Eaton says, “everything’s the same but everything’s different.”

These tensions stem from a central conundrum in the Rock Plaza Central camp: they never intended to aim for the level of popularity Are We Not Horses achieved. And while they’re not foolish enough to shy away from the attention — Eaton fairly glows when he talks about how the album is now part of the curriculum at an Alabama university — they’re still struggling with it.

If that existential crisis has a direct connection to the thematic content of the album, it’s had just as important an effect on Rock Plaza Central’s sound. In contrast to the exuberant singalongs of Horses, …at the moment is made of tighter, more urgent stuff: dense webs of guitar and banjo propel “A Mule On Fire”; brassy fanfares shoot through the anthemic “Them That Are Good And Them That Are Bad.”

“When we finished working on it, I really did feel like it was a more accomplished record,” Eaton says. “Our last album was mostly about how happy I was and how many great things were happening in our lives — kids were being born, relationships were thriving. And it was great hearing that it’d helped people through stuff; meeting American soldiers and discovering that they’d listened to it in Iraq and Afghanistan. But,” he trails off, “it’s been a hard time for me. My parents have both been sick in the last year, and the new record actually helped me through a lot of stuff. And so when something like ‘Oh I Can’ comes on, it feels more like I can make it through. I think this one’s more of a grower. I hope people listen.”