And it’s fucking amazing. The band recorded it in the early 2000s, sharing a house in Austin, working jobs and making music together in their twenties. Then the original line-up split, leaving the recordings unfinished. Two decades later, they returned to those recordings and finally completed the album. So you’re hearing it for the first time, but part of what you hear has been waiting since those days. The photographs, the grunge roots: you recognise the period, perhaps something of yourself. These songs were never part of your youth, yet here they are, carrying someone else’s memories and stirring your own.
For Steven Higginbotham, who kept the early recordings, the unfinished album remained a loose end. “These songs always lingered in my mind, and I felt there was a gap of material important and pivotal in all of our lives,” he says. The original line-up had dissolved, and The Wheel Workers eventually continued with different members, but these songs stayed unfinished. During the pandemic, Higginbotham began reconnecting with his former bandmates. “We had some long phone calls,” he says. “There was a little bit of strain between some of us, but we smoothed it out.” The account is brief, leaving the private parts private. Still, you can appreciate what those conversations made possible. Before returning to the music, they had to speak to one another. And when Higginbotham listened again, the songs held up: “I realized the magic was still there and they still resonated with me.”
That must be a lovely discovery, finding that something you cared about in your twenties still deserves your attention. You might expect to hear only the distance between who you were and who you have become. Higginbotham heard work he wanted to finish, and felt he finally had the means to do it. “I felt like I was finally a good enough recording engineer and producer to finish these songs at the level they deserve; it's me in my forties producing the best music of my twenties.” There is an appealing reversal here. Usually, we wish we could take what we know now back to some earlier moment. He could bring that experience to recordings which had survived from his. The years that delayed the album also gave him the skills to complete it.
The process brought those two ages into unusually close contact. Higginbotham built on the original performances with new recordings from drummer Nathan Maness and bassist Giuseppe Ponti. He replaced some lead vocals; elsewhere, he added harmonies to his younger voice. Pause on that for a moment. You put on the headphones, listen to yourself twenty years ago, and sing along. The voice you remember becomes someone you can make something with again. More recent members joined the conversation too: Dan Workman and Craig Wilkins contributed synthesisers, while Erin Rodgers and Alli Villines added harmonies. Recording at Houston’s Wire Road Studios and Higginbotham’s home studio, The Attic, followed by Steve Christensen’s mix, brought the material into a finished, 16-track album. What you hear belongs to several moments at once, with performances made decades apart sharing the same song.
So when the record takes you back, where exactly are you going? The band can name the people and places behind it. You may simply recognise the feeling of having time to make something with your friends. On the closing track, In The Breeze, they preserved a song that grew from playing together, arriving almost complete from a jam. “It captures that feeling of riding the wave of music’s spontaneity, and the joy and connection that comes through making music together,” Higginbotham says. That feeling survived the unfinished album, the separation and the intervening years. For the listener, discovering it now creates a curious kind of nostalgia: the songs are unfamiliar, but the affection behind them makes sense. You cannot remember this record being there. You can understand why they wanted to bring it back.