Today I’m so excited to reintroduce everyone to The Wheel Workers who are going to be releasing their new album, nearly 20 years in the making, with One More Thing To Say. While the band released a new record four years ago, the first taste of the direction the band went into comes on “Spreading The Fire,” a song that the band hope reinvigorates their fanbase. If you’re enjoying the single, please consider pre-ordering the new album here.
‘Spreading the Fire’ is about rediscovering the things that made you feel most alive in your youth and refusing to let them disappear beneath the weight of adult routine. The fire in the song is the creative spark — the conviction that art, shared experience, and genuine human connection give life its deepest meaning. For us, that’s making music together. The chorus — I wanna be someone else / I wanna bathe in the fire — is the feeling of wanting to dissolve back into that youthful state of pure devotion, when music wasn’t something you had to make time for occasionally but something you felt like you lived inside of completely. What makes this song unusual on the album is that, unlike the other demos from that early period that made the album, it didn’t fully exist the first time around. When I went back through old file folders and CD backups (yeah, really) while rebuilding One More Thing To Say — our long-lost sophomore album, recorded in demo form with the original Austin lineup over twenty years ago and never properly recorded and released — I found an instrumental demo with no vocals, just a title: ‘Spreading the Fire.’ I wrote an entirely new vocal melody and lyrics decades after the music was first recorded, which meant the song became a true collaboration across time, between who we were then and who we are now. That process ended up reflecting the song’s own message: keeping the creative flame alive isn’t about living in the past, it’s about carrying it forward. Having Steve Christensen mix the track helped us realize that vision and finally share these songs with the world the way we’d always hoped.