If Rosanne Cash had a wheel, she’d finally be driving it.
Thirty years after its original release, The Wheel has been remastered and reissued — not because the record label suddenly remembered what “critically acclaimed” means, but because Cash finally got the masters back from Sony. “I didn’t expect how it would feel to actually get my master recordings back,” she says. “It was really moving.” The album now launches her new label with John Leventhal, RumbleStrip Records — a hell of a mission statement for a debut.
For Cash, The Wheel isn’t just an album. It’s a document of combustion — divorce, rebirth, new love, and professional reinvention. “We fell in love making this record,” she says, “and we’ve now been together 30 years.” But don’t expect the music to sound like a honeymoon suite. This was her first post-Nashville, post-Rodney Crowell release, and the self-doubt looms large. “The label didn’t want Interiors. They said, ‘We can’t do anything with this.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s going to get worse.’”
It did. But it also got better.
“I started writing these songs full of fire and longing and transformation and destruction,” she explains. “And I asked John to produce the record. He said, ‘I’ll co-produce it with you.’” The partnership stuck, musically and otherwise.
As for listening back three decades later? “I don’t usually like looking back… but I was touched. That’s a really accurate reflection of that time in our lives.”
Cash compares it to a back-against-the-wall album, a pivot point where everything either implodes or evolves. “It wasn’t that successful,” she says bluntly. “And yet it found its audience — which is really all you can hope for.” She still hears from fans who say the album got them through their divorce. One couple even told her they were embedded in war zones on opposite sides of the world, both listening to The Wheel — they eventually got married. “Isn’t that crazy?” she says, and laughs in disbelief.
The new edition comes with a bonus disc of live recordings from 1993, including an Austin City Limits performance and the long-lost Columbia Records Radio Hour set featuring Lucinda Williams and a very unsure-sounding David Byrne. “We probably rehearsed minimally,” she says. “I’m not sure he was used to singing harmony.” If you’ve ever wanted to hear David Byrne nervously harmonizing with Rosanne Cash, here’s your moment.
The original video for the title track — directed by Pet Sematary’s Mary Lambert, fresh off a stint with Red Shoe Diaries — is also worth revisiting, if only to see Cash perched on a Malibu cliff with no guardrail. “I said to someone in the crew, ‘I think she was nervous about me falling off.’ He goes, ‘She doesn’t care if you fall off. She wanted the shot.’”
Alongside the reissue, Cash is hitting the road for a short run of Reinventing the Wheel shows — postponed from last year due to knee replacement surgery. “I didn’t want to do a B.B. King and sit the whole time,” she says. Some songs will be reimagined, others remain untouchable. “There’s a guitar part on the title track that only three people in the world can play: Steuart Smith, Larry Campbell, and a stage tech in Sydney. John freely admits he can’t do it.”
She’s also quick to plug Leventhal’s debut solo album, coming out as RumbleStrip’s second release. “It’s so beautiful, so complex,” she says. “People will really be surprised.” And then there’s the National track she sings on, a Norma Rae Broadway musical in the works, and a Lou Reed tribute album where she covers “Magician” from Magic and Loss. (“So dark. So eerie.”)
So yeah, maybe this is a sophomore record — just one that showed up fashionably late.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
