The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia-based Americana outfit The Steel Wheels originally dealt with the pandemic downtime by encouraging their fans to share personal stories, which the band would turn into songs as a way of staying connected to those fans.
As fate would have it, those songs evolved into two albums and eventually a two-season collaborative podcast with their local public radio station.
Lead singer and principal songwriter Trent Wagler said that like many bands, they were experimenting with ideas on how to connect with their fans.
“That was sort of the idea,” said Wagler. “And we didn't know initially whether we would enjoy it, whether it would be a disaster, whether we would over-promise and not be able to pull it off. But I think especially in the spring of 2020, everybody was throwing anything against the wall and seeing what would stick you know. And so this was the idea that came out and we ran with it.
The band reached out via social media and their own email list.
“The fun thing at first was that it was just a creative exercise for the band. We had no aspiration to release any of this to the public. It was a fun outlet just to try out ideas and do our best to be true and honor the stories we were given. And so that frees you up to experiment and try different things and play around a bit. But once we sort of had this pile of songs, I could see an album,” said Wagler.
The podcast idea wasn’t far behind.
“Because we thought, ‘How can we really translate this whole thing to people?’ It just felt like it was tailor made for the medium of a podcast. And of course, immediately, people are asking, ‘Hey, how can I get a song?’ And so all told, I think by about June of 2021, we had written about 45 or so original songs based off of stories. Of those 45, we released a total of 18, with ‘Every One A Song Vol. 2,'" said Wagler.
He said the band initially didn’t offer many parameters to the kinds of stories that could be told. And though the pandemic was raging, they didn’t ask fans to feel constrained by that idea, even if some of that crept into individual songs.
“The very first podcast episode was for a song called ‘Water and Sky.’ And he was like, ‘I used to play music with some of my friends, I don't consider myself that great of a musician, but I would love to just have a song that is my song.’ And it was just so sweet. He was this man who loved music and told me a bunch of stories about this group of friends he used to play music with where he lives in Kansas. And I sort of tried to put that into the song,” said Wagler.
In isolation / I won’t forget all the songs that we’d sung
The Cottonwood River still runs deep and wide
It gathers together / The river runs dry
- From “Water and Sky” by The Steel Wheels
“And then it was very interesting to take on some of those songs that were honoring a life, you know, the passing of someone that is proud, that's probably the hardest song to write and feel confident about because it's a huge responsibility. And if the job of the artist is at least, in part, to work with empathy, to try to get into some sort of authentic sense of life. It was really a great experience for us as a band and for me as a writer to be able to just sit in some of these stories that we were honored to be given and try to make music out of them."
Of the 45 songs the band eventually fleshed from various fans, they chose 18 to record over two albums. Wagler said even though the whittling was initially daunting, they found their way the same as they have done for any past album.
“That's where it got to be more about the music,” said Wagler. “If we were going to release the music to the public, we wanted it to be the most accessible songs, songs that are going to try or we hope will be a little more universal in nature. The nice thing about it was that since I was writing most of the songs, and I was the one predominantly in conversations with the person who offered up the story, the rest of the band had a pretty flat response to the songs — where it was more just like any other album process that we would have as a band where we do kind of a straight up voting process where we list out the songs and in this case, it was probably the most immense because of the list. We had 45 songs. So, it's like a rating system. You can't really judge which stories are the ones you need in there because really, I enjoyed every one of the songs in a different way when it came to the actual experience of hearing people's stories,” explained Wagler.
The album was an incredibly creative idea that turned out well. The podcast is a creative idea that has turned out well. So much so it has Wagler and the band wondering if this project could have longer legs.
“Especially in a time where there's a lot of people who are privileged, people love to talk about, you know, not knowing what to get somebody because they already have everything. Or the idea of creating a song for someone. I've seen this beauty of when people recognize themselves, literally. In a song. There's nothing like it. It just really washes over them and this feeling of immense gratitude. And hopefully they feel really seen in who they are, what they've done or experienced. I haven't quite figured out if this is something that could be a larger group of songwriters that offer this as a possibility and then people can pitch their song ideas. I definitely thought about that as a possible way to take this project and see it see it out even further,” said Wagler.
The Steel Wheels play The Stable Music Hall and Lounge in downtown Bloomington Friday night.
