20 years is a long time to spend doing anything at all. It’s an age for any group of people to sustain a collective effort. For a band on the road, 20 years can be more than a lifetime. Yet, after 2 decades of making music together in living rooms, listening rooms, clubs, theaters, and festival stages, The Steel Wheels are still growing, still pushing, still at it, and they’re marking the occasion with the release of their 9th studio album, “The Steel Wheels”.
Following the release of “Sideways” in 2024, their 3rd record with producer Sam Kassirer at his Great North Sound Society studio in interior Maine, the band felt it was time for a change of scene. As the group began to select songs for a new album, they also had to find an answer to the question of where they would get down to the work of record-making. They didn’t know that answer was going to knock on their back door.
At the band’s 2024 Red Wing Roots festival, held each summer near the group’s home base of Harrisonburg, VA, banjo player and songwriter Trent Wagler spied producer and engineer D. James Goodwin (Goose, Bonny Light Horseman, I’m With Her) in the crowd and later reached out to learn what he was doing so far from his home turf of New York. It happened that Goodwin, who mixed the band’s 2019 album “Over The Trees”, had just pulled up stakes for the Shenandoah Valley and was setting up a new studio on the band’s doorstep. Several months and one video call later, Wagler, fiddler Eric Brubaker, multi-instrumentalist Jay Lapp, drummer/percussionist Kevin Garcia, and bass player Jeremy Darrow gathered in the new space, The Isokon, snug against the snowy Virginia winter, to begin recording their next album.
The process that Goodwin cultivated was fluid and swift. Demo listening in the morning flowed into tracking the whole band live in one room. The session was punctuated by peals of laughter and occasional tears as the group kept themselves in the moment, leaning in to every emotion and embracing that vulnerability. As they worked, the music took shape in the moment, right in front of the microphones, each participant listening and responding as the songs flickered to life. By dinner time the songs of the day were complete and talk moved to the next day’s work.
The album that resulted from this process captures the multifaceted band in full-flight, pivoting effortlessly between the folk rock band they’ve grown into over 20 years, and the harmony-centric acoustic ensemble that they’ve been since the beginning.The band puts their impressive range on display throughout “The Steel Wheels”; energy, insight, and humor, balance with tender, highly personal moments of masterful restraint and expression as the album unfolds. As ever, the band challenges themselves to find new ways through the music, using space and, at moments, reinventing their approach to the string band format.
As usual, Wagler’s keen lyrics provide insight by posing big questions. At first blush “Easy” sounds like the song of the summer, but a deeper listen asks the audience to consider whether it’s worth the cost to have the world waiting for us on the other side of our screens. “Everything is easy”, but is it really?
Beyond our glowing devices “Go Back” studies the complexity of our relationships and the time we spend with those close to us. It’s easy to say that we must take the bad with the good, it’s a challenge to seek to understand how our joy and sadness are entwined; that they are not opposing feelings, but sibling emotions.
“Keep On Dancing” offers the listener a greater challenge; to take a step back from distraction and our self-imposed tasks, to look beyond the static of the day, and to see the beauty all around us. The song gently implores us to take a breath and be still so that we can glimpse the things that are actually important.
The Steel Wheels have kept their stride for longer than most bands survive. After 20 years hard at work “The Steel Wheels” is an album of creative maturity with a restless sense of adventure. Here’s to 20 more.
