Ahead of Savannah Music Festival, Rosanne Cash talks 30 years of 'The Wheel' and Georgia music faves

Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal are touring in celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Wheel, Cash's album they co-produced together in 1993. The recording was recently reissued on RumbleStrip Records, the label the pair (who married in 1995) launched this summer.

In 1991, when Cash moved to Manhattan from Nashville, she was neither the first nor only country singer to make a pilgrimage there. She arrived in New York City with a string of No. 1 country hits under her belt, four kids and a famous family.

On the heels of the acclaimed self-reflections of 1990’s Interiors, the songs she wrote for her eighth album, The Wheel, offered a more pointed sense of place, echoing the rhythms of a new frontier for her life and music.

The Wheel included contributions from Benmont Tench, Bruce Cockburn, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Marc Cohn, Patty Larkin, Steuart Smith and others. From the sparkling guitar on the title track to the dreamy, doubled-edged "Sleeping in Paris," to the romantic frustration of "You Won't Let Me In," the sound Cash and Leventhal created has become its own genre, a mind-meld that has continued through their many collaborations since.

Three decades after its release, the touch points of The Wheel — motherhood, divorce, independence, pursuit of art, new love — still sound fresh.

GPB's Kristi York Wooten spoke with Cash ahead of her upcoming performances with Leventhal on April 3 at the 2024 Savannah Music Festival and April 7 at the Buckhead Theatre in Atlanta. 

This transcript and recording have been edited for length and clarity.

Kristi York Wooten: You know I'm excited to ask you about The Wheel, because it's one of my favorite records of all time. You've called the record “a risk” because you were just in the midst of leaving Nashville [more than a decade into your career and at the end of a marriage] and coming to New York. Is it also the album that made you a songwriter? Obviously, you were a celebrated, hugely successful songwriter before that, but just in terms of living into your confidence as a songwriter, just like, ‘This is me. This is who I am. Nobody owns these words but me.’

Rosanne Cash: Well, I felt like that was [1990’s] Interiors. Like, “This is me, truly me.” And so, that's why it was so devastating when the label didn't want it and didn't want to promote it and said, “There's nothing we can do with this,” because that was profoundly confusing to me. It was a split in what had been commercially successful and who they thought I was and who I knew I was. But The Wheel, yeah.

Then I let go of any kind of pretense of trying to do something commercial, although I'd let it go with Interiors, as well. But there was a lot of freedom in writing those songs. And The Wheel came from real despair, you know, like just everything falling apart, none of it making sense anymore. And that was accompanied by real joy and anticipation to … like, I was on the precipice of a whole new life, and I didn't know how it was going to turn out. So, there's excitement and also real fear.

Kristi York Wooten: And listening to some of the songs on The Wheel, you definitely feel the excitement. But there's also a hope. And I wanted to ask you about hope in songwriting as a concept, because sometimes hope does come from those moments of despair, and that's when you really find those golden moments. And across the 30 years of listening to this record, and kind of the way things are politically now, and the world seems disjointed, do you think hope felt broader [in 1993] than now? We kind of pinpoint our hopes on certain things, and The Wheel has this sort of broad hope to it — a new sky, new skyline, if you will.

Rosanne Cash: But not completely. I mean, “If There's a God on My Side” is really, really despairing. And even though “The Truth About You” is kind of this quiet confidence, there is this like moment in it of like, "This could not work. We could sail on separately." But that's an interesting idea about "Was hope broader then?" Well, certainly for me, but I don't know if that's a function of the times or a function of age, because when you're younger, you do have more possibilities, right?

Hope is broader when you're 23, like the entire world is laid out before you, and in your 30s, you still have a vestige of that. I think, at my age now, I have hope, but it's narrowed to this path and mission that I've created for myself. It's like, “I'm never going to be a ballet dancer now.” “Oh, yeah. I'm not going to have any more babies.” You know, there's a lot of things that, like, it gets narrower, but also you get a mastery of what you do.

You know, but hope being broader, that's a great concept. And I think it belongs to young people. Although I do know — having said that — I think the chief job of being a parent, a grandparent is optimism. So for them, I have the broadest hope in the world.

Kristi York Wooten: Yeah, that makes perfect sense, because I wrote down by this question: “Are we just older?” But I do think that, yeah, that sort of broad hope does come back through kids.

You mentioned “If There's a God on My Side.” And this song has been on my mind the last few weeks because I don't know if you know Karl Wallinger from World Party, who passed [March 10]? You know, he had a song called “God on My Side,” as well. Totally different songs, obviously, his came out in 1990, but it’s from that same sort of two- or three-year period [as yours]. And you said your song came from a deep place… but there's a lot of that right now [in songwriting], people are sort of "Where's God?" But I wanted to ask you to expound on “If There's a God on My Side,” 30 years later.

Rosanne Cash: I should say that I listened to World Party’s Goodbye Jumbo constantly before I wrote the songs for The Wheel. So, makes sense if there was something of that in there. And I was a huge fan of Karl. That was just a heartbreak. Well, yeah, I think, you know, like [early 20th century Austrian poet] Rilke said, "You have to love the questions," and that's a big question.

Is there something bigger than us? Who cares about us? And, yeah, that's been a constant question through my life. And I think through many lives. I'm not, I don't have any certainty about that. I think it's arrogant to have certainty about it, you know. So, in moments of real grief and despair, and that kind of desperate longing that you feel like, "Is something going to take care of me? Is someone looking out for me?" I mean, that's kind of universal human experience, isn't it?

Kristi York Wooten:  But I guess for songwriters, that's a main question in the songwriting, too. It’s like, "Why am I here? Why am I writing this? What is my life doing?”

Rosanne Cash: Questions are like prayers to me. You know, it shows a humility of action and … Also, there’s just … it's more interesting, rather than having someone tell you what you should know.

Kristi York Wooten: OK, I want to ask you a question about sort of your Southern roots. And I know that you had said in New York, too, sometimes New York allows you to be your Southern self. I certainly felt that when I got there, I had to get away from the South. I had to get away from the whole set up … And I know you didn't quite spend as much time growing up in the South maybe as I did. But tell me a little bit more about that and The Wheel, like, which parts of you were coming out on the record?

Rosanne Cash: Oh, well I think my instincts towards chord progressions and melody, you know, have a Southern quality to them, even the ones that are farthest away from being classically Southern. There's still something in that, you know, that I don't get away from. But I wasn't embracing it consciously on that record. Definitely not. I was in a moving-away phase. It wasn't until [2009’s] The List that I think I started to really, deeply embrace it again and appreciate it. And then [2014’s] River and the Thread was, you know, putting a lot of conflicts to rest in myself.

Kristi York Wooten: When I was listening to The Wheel this week, the song “You Won't Let Me In” stands up so great. I'm not saying it's a Southern-sounding thing, per se, but just the, you know, guitar and the atmosphere, sort of the atmospheric elements of that song just stand up so great. Like I am right back wherever [in NYC] I was when I was listening to that the first time, especially. That's one of the ones that does it to me. Of course, “Seventh Avenue” probably is one of them, too. But which of the songs on the record really takes you back to like a moment you can remember specifically?

Rosanne Cash: That song! Yes, “You Won't Let Me In.” I mean, I feel that rush of kind of sexy, you know, kind of lust and urgency [in the song]. But in January, I was singing “The Truth About You” with John standing next to me. And I was overcome with the feeling of falling in love with him again. I was just overcome. I could touch every bit of it. And God, that's the, you know, it's so beautiful when music can do that to you, like you were just describing, take you back to that very moment. So I guess, at different times, different nights, different songs resonate like that. But “You Won't Let Me In.” I agree with you. There's an urgency of it that's permanent.

Kristi York Wooten: [Let’s talk about Georgia music]. How about Gladys Knight, Ray Charles, Little Richard. And then, of course, the more modern things like R.E.M or B-52's or Collective Soul or any of that stuff.

Rosanne Cash: Well, Ray Charles, I'd have to go with him as, kind of a quintessential template for me in my life. Like, before I discovered the Beatles on my own. My mom and dad would play Ray Charles in the house, and that just went in by osmosis. And I think [1962’s] Modern Sounds in Country and Western music is a perfect album. Otis Redding, I mean — one of the greatest voices to ever live. Gladys Knight. Actually, context and content: “Midnight Train to Georgia.” I mean, that's perfect. Perfect record. Perfect voice. R.E.M.? Yeah, man! “Losing My Religion” made a profound impact on me.

Kristi York Wooten: Tell me a little bit more about that.

Rosanne Cash: Well, the structure of that song, you know, the way that he used internal rhymes? Michael Stipe used internal rhymes, and that it wasn't classically set up in a classical rhyme scheme. But every line folded in over itself? I just loved that. That was inspiring to me. And also, the whole concept of like, the freedom of losing your religion. I felt that when I stopped being Catholic. And then, of course, my daughter became a Catholic. Of course, that's what happens, right?

Kristi York Wooten: It all comes back to you in the next generation.

Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal will perform in Savannah, Ga., on Wednesday, April 3 at 7:30 p.m. at the Lucas Theatre for the Arts as part of the 2024 Savannah Music Festival. The duo will also perform at Atlanta's Buckhead Theatre on Sunday, April 7 at 7:30 p.m.