Finding Hope: Flying Over the Trees with The Steel Wheels

Music is hope, right?

The Steel Wheels, from Harrisonburg, Virginia, traffic in that kind of positive ideology, steering roads on their bicycles and in vans, spreading a kind of honest truth in their music. Which isn’t to say their songs are full of Kumbaya (that’s not bad, either, fwiw), but rather that, at all times, the music possesses subtle optimism, some compact convictions.

The Steel Wheels released a new record this week – Over the Trees – replete with metaphors for staring down the (manmade) Sisyphean challenge of living and doing our level best to overcome. Or at the least, live a little. Find ways to connect to the world around us, however it is we can. I don’t think anyone in the band – Trent Wagler (guitar/banjo), Eric Brubaker (fiddle), Brian Dickel (bass), Jay Lapp (guitars/mando), and Kevin Garcia (drums/percussion) – would judge how a person connects (though I certainly suspect they’d encourage a more tangible approach).

They made a beautiful record, the kind that feels a little like faith sweating from the soul. It possesses mantras and meditations, the sorts of phrases that provoke a little self-insight, if willing.

*Press photo of The Steel Wheels, courtesy of photographer Josh Saul*

Not that you have to meditate to love it. With Sam Kassirer at the helm and The Steel Wheels’ endless love of exploration, they retained their trademark harmonizing – my God, just listen to them sing together on “This Year” (I’ll come back to this song in a moment) – adding rhythmic and electronic flourishes, as well as traipsing around the world to inform these songs. But even still, the core of Over the Trees is its dusky soul, its civil twilight dreams.

Hope doesn’t mean relentlessly positive. To paraphrase Cohen, there’s no light without darkness. And this record has plenty of shadows. Tragedy struck the band when Eric Brubaker’s 10-year old daughter died following a sudden illness; it changed some of the textures and meanings of these songs, reshaped them the way a natural disaster shifts the earth’s face.

“Rains Come”, a song using a Noah’s Ark conceit, is both about the realities of our shifting climates and the destructive nature of denying reality (listen, we all know it’s real), as well as articulating the unsure nature of moving forward. v“But no one ever told me it would be like this / When the rains come / Is it gonna be a new day?” could just as easily be about overcoming the punch of disbelief and grief as it is about the balancing of faith in the future with the self-evident cloud of disaster right on the edge of the horizon. And sonically, it’s a village holding together this song. Kevin Garcia’s percussion and that funky Mellotron add something never found on a Steel Wheels record.

“Keep On” follows, its anthemic exploration of self-discovery and sharing wisdom painfully familiar to anyone in a family. I few of the songs came from Trent Wagler’s song-a-day experiment of January 2018, including “Falling” “Under”, and “Get to Work”, the last already an earworm for my daily grind (and a reminder that it’s a privilege to do work that fulfills me, be it as a husband, an uncle, a teacher, a writer, or a photographer). “I’ll Be Ready” is a love-song co-written with Sarah Siskind that is destined for the next time I get on my knee and pledge my love to my wife (it is a semi-regular thing, by now).

The heaviest songs, though, might just be “Something New” and “Waiting in the Dark”. The former is almost a lament for the loss of the lived moment in favor of the recorded moment, lyrics gliding over rhythms rooted in Africa or Brazil. The latter explores the trauma of unexpected loss and the hole that remains in the leaving over the hypnotic throb of the mando matched with a marimba.

But last – fittingly so – is the song with the most hope and honesty. “This Year” has to be the moment when the band crowds around a single mic, leaning into the darkness to spread hope. It’s almost farcical; Trent would acknowledge that the message is exaggerated, stressed too strongly, but that’s the point. There’s a wild release of sentimentality, and that’s a desperately human trait that is too often denied. Think on the times we slide into song because we need to, because sometimes it’s what carries us through. Think on the maudlin nature of every holiday song so many of us love and can only sing for a short time. Think of the way a phrase like, “It’s a wonderful life” has almost become relegated to a certain time of the year.

And then let yourself feel it every time you hear this song. Sing with The Steel Wheels,