The Steel Wheels

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.