THE STEEL WHEELS

Virginia-based folk-rock band The Steel Wheels have spent almost twenty years writing, recording, and touring, all the while constantly honing their evolving brand of American roots music. Additionally they are the founders and hosts of the Red Wing Roots Music Festival, a beloved staple of the Shenandoah Valley. Through the years, The Steel Wheels have drawn on both traditional form and modern sounds to capture the beauty in all of life’s varied trials and triumphs. Their new album, Sideways, which releases on February 9, 2024 via Big Ring Records, is a meditation on resilience and survival. Trent Wagler, the band’s lead singer and primary songwriter, penned many of the songs in response to loss, and the uncertainty that comes with facing what we can’t control.

In 2019, The Steel Wheels were blindsided by the death of fiddle player and vocalist Eric Brubaker’s young daughter to a sudden illness. This incredible weight inspired some of the lines of “Easy on Your Way”, an almost hymn-like anthem that speaks to the desire to find something to say or give in the middle of heartache. But in spite of the weight at the heart of the song, it still rollicks with energy like a barn dance dirge—it’s a call to just be in your grief and pain while holding on to hope that we are in it all together.

In addition to finding resolve in loss, many of the songs on Sideways heavily grapple with the experience of watching the suffering of those we love, but feeling unequipped and helpless to know what to do—or if there is even anything we cando. In the depths of a pandemic, mostly isolated and sequestered from the rest of the world, Wagler’s own child faced a serious mental health crisis and needed immediate treatment. Thankfully they were able to find a program to receive the help they needed. Still the complicated, unending journey of mental health, experienced from the inside and as a spectator, was at the front of mind as the songs for Sideways were written.