(Aired Thu 03/19/26) Fred Thomas (@fredthomas) and Steve Shelley (@steveshelley) of the band Winged Wheel (@winged__wheel) joined WUTC's Paul Jorgensen in conversation delving into the band's origins, their improvisational philosophy, and their upcoming performance at the Big Ears Music Festival In Knoxville, Tenn, Saturday March 28 2026 at 9:45 PM at Barley's.
We shared Michigan talk (all of us are from there), but we also spoke about Winged Wheel's music, their history, and how public media, college radio, and local music scenes connected through record stores play an impact.
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Enjoy!
Transcript: Winged Wheel Interview on Chord Drift (generated by AI)
Fred Thomas: Ah, my name's Fred Thomas. I play in Winged Wheel and I play a variety of things in the band—some guitar, some synthesizer, some samplers, really whatever's called for.
Steve Shelley: I'm Steve Shelley and I play drums in Winged Wheel.
Paul Jorgensen: Thank you so much for joining me. This is—this is a real treat. I want to—radio listeners can't see this, but I do want to show off my—my bona fides. [Paul holds up a copy of Winged Wheel's "No Island" LP; pj]
Fred Thomas: Oh yeah.
Steve Shelley: Yeah.
Paul Jorgensen: Yeah. I—when I came—I had been overseas for a number of years, and before I left, I had sadly gotten rid of all of my LPs and stuff like that. So when I came back, I needed to start rebuilding it and this was actually one of the earliest records that I had picked up. I think I had seen an article about it in like Aquarium Drunkard, gave it a listen and I'm like, "Oh, yeah. I need to get that."
Fred Thomas: Fantastic. Starting over—starting over weird.
Paul Jorgensen: Yes, yes, but engaging.
Fred Thomas: Fantastic.
Paul Jorgensen: Which actually kind of brings up my—my first question. So when I was telling people I was going to interview y'all, you know, folks that didn't know you said, "Okay, so what kind of music is it?" And I went, "Uh, it's a lit—it's a..." So how do you describe Winged Wheel's music to other people?
Fred Thomas: That's a great question and one I think everybody in the band might struggle to land on a—a description of or agree with each other's descriptions of too. There is always kind of like a Krautrock baseline, like, you know, going back to like the '70s bands, Can is a huge one for everybody and Neu! a little bit like—but that's sort of just—you say Krautrock, that's kind of just like music now, too. Most music has a starting point with Krautrock in 2026. I like to think of it as we're six improvisers who are all bringing our own personalities to each other and conflicting, contrasting, and complementing each other within that. So—improvised music?
Steve Shelley: Mm-hm.
Paul Jorgensen: That definitely qualifies. What about you, Steve? You got any additional thoughts?
Steve Shelley: Um, yeah, I would agree with Fred there and I guess usually if someone would ask me, I would—I would somehow avoid describing Winged Wheel's music, uh, and yeah, maybe—describe the personalities. It is a listening group, I find.
Paul Jorgensen: One of the things I especially appreciate is the fact that all of the albums are very distinct from each other.
Fred Thomas: That's one of the main goals. Like, um, this project started in sort of a strange way in that it wasn't meant to be a band. It was just one of those early—early 2020 projects that a lot of people were doing. So—changed and grew into a band, like the first record Steve didn't even play on, we weren't even really friends or associated at that point, and he joined the band and Will, who plays lap steel, joined the band and we all met up in person for the first time for the second record, Big Hotel, and then we ended up playing some more shows and—and every time we got together, it was like, "Oh, we need to like keep doing something different." So every record has—the goal has been to have it sound very distinct from the last one.
Paul Jorgensen: You've definitely achieved that. On the new album, I've been playing a lot of the various Canvases, Canvai...
Fred Thomas: Canvases. It must be.
Paul Jorgensen: Um, and the kind of the atmosphere that comes out of them is interesting 'cause you can still feel that improvisational spirit, even though it's a recorded piece of music. Does that make sense?
Fred Thomas: Yeah, for sure.
Steve Shelley: Mm-hm.
Paul Jorgensen: Yeah. So I've been absolutely loving it. When you—when you all first did get together, where was that? 'Cause you all are spread out all over the Midwest, right?
Fred Thomas: We are. Well, all over all over. Um, we've got members in Chicago and Cleveland and Texas and—and we got together in Kingston, New York, which is where Corey, the bass player, lives and Steve lives in New Jersey, not far from there. There was kind of like a studio that one of Corey's friends had and we—we met up there to record the second record, Big Hotel.
Paul Jorgensen: And then this one, if I remember correctly, y'all did that just outside of Chicago?
Steve Shelley: That's true, and um, some of the Canvases that you mentioned, yeah, they were almost like field recordings done at Tubby's in Kingston. We had a weekend where—where Whitney came to Tubby's and Corey and I joined her and we had a trio show and so we built a few what would become basic tracks that we—we built a few of them that weekend. And we would pass stuff around before we all got together in Chicago. So there was some familiarity to the—to the music that we were working on, and then also we were—we were playing live, so we started playing some of the stuff live. So that all informed us going into the Rec Room just outside of Chicago to kind of finish up recording for this record. Hopefully that wasn't too long and winding there.
Paul Jorgensen: No, it was perfectly the right length of winding and long. Um, so that kind of speaks to one of the things that's interesting about the band is it started out very much as a passing around of bits and then putting them together, and now you've got that live element. How do you—I guess what is that magic that goes and puts those different pieces together? 'Cause they've got a different energy to them, right?
Fred Thomas: Yeah, I—I think it's all about the personalities of the people playing and where we are at in—I don't know if emotionally is the right word, but where we are at like where we're at in our days when we—when we happen to be in the same room as each other. Speaking for myself, the first time we all got together, that's kind of like the first time the six of us were in the same room and we started playing music like seconds after we'd all like just introduced each other, you know. And—and I'd met everybody and—and we'd all kind of like crossed paths and stuff like that, but like—it's kind of like, "Okay, like, here's like the first date and now let's get married," was kind of the vibe a little bit. Um, and so there was some nervousness there and there's like a little bit of that excitement and nervousness on—on those recordings. Yeah, so like I think it all has a lot to do with like where these six people, these six spirits are in their—in their journeys. And playing live together, like Steve's saying, like we—we were playing a—like one of our first tours before we recorded the Desert So Green tracks, like we, you know, played a week of shows that were all over the map. We had some really good shows, we had some less than great shows, we had some times where it was like easy traveling and some times where it was like kind of rigorous and—and uncomfortable, and—and all of that got filtered into the music.
Paul Jorgensen: So as you're playing the songs live that had been primarily passed around MP3s and whatnot like that, then you assemble them and you put them on the record, but then now you're going to go out and play these live, getting that energy and—and making it kind of live on its own as a live entity as opposed to—it keeps changing.
Fred Thomas: Like and in—in the live format, like—like the songs are never complete necessarily, so we'll, you know, we—when we met up in person and recorded the second record, which is basically the first record with the whole band, we just—we just played and improvised and then from those hours and hours of improvisations, we kind of like pieced together and collaged together a record and then we tried to like recreate those songs when we started playing shows and—and it was always different. And we just did a European tour where we're playing some of the songs off our last two records and—and they're pretty different. They get different every night and sometimes we take the energy down, sometimes they stretch out, sometimes they are truncated. Um, it's a very amorphous organism.
Paul Jorgensen: If I understand right, y'all had a tour of Europe and then the last date of the tour is actually Big Ears in Knoxville?
Fred Thomas: We did a European tour and we're going to go do Big Ears in a couple weeks, but I, you know, not that we haven't done much between those two.
Steve Shelley: Punctuation mark.
Paul Jorgensen: Well, it's exciting to have y'all there. Have you done Big Ears before?
Steve Shelley: I haven't.
Fred Thomas: No, I haven't either. I think Whitney has, Whitney who is our viola player, vocalist, she has so many projects and she does—Matchess is her solo thing and she plays with a bunch of people, does a lot of like improvised and drone music stuff and Big Ears is like her—her zone. So I think she's done it a couple times, but I don't think anybody else in the band has.
Paul Jorgensen: Well, it's very exciting to have you guys there and this is going to be my first time going, certainly as a member of the station, but even as just a regular civilian in life. So I'm looking forward to it. But of course, there's no substitute for coming here to Chattanooga, I just want to tell you that.
Fred Thomas: I—I understand, I understand. I've played in Chattanooga before and it is a different thing. I played at a—it was a very huge venue with like a lot of like satin on the walls. It was like maybe like it was like a social club in the '40s and '50s and they're doing gigs in like the early 2000s. Does that sound familiar to you at all?
Paul Jorgensen: It does, it might be Memorial, it might be the Tib—was it the Tivoli Theater? Was it like a theater space or was it more like...
Fred Thomas: It might have been the Tivoli Theater. It was really fun, the show was pretty much empty, so it was like a huge theater with like five indie rockers there. It was great.
Paul Jorgensen: Get out and get traction and stuff like that. Hopefully it's not as quiet as before in the crowd.
Fred Thomas: Well, that's my thing, that's—that was the fault of my band back then. Not the city and not the venue.
Paul Jorgensen: What do you guys have on the horizon after Big Ears?
Steve Shelley: I've got a—a few dates in Europe with Bill Orcutt and Ethan Miller, we have a trio that also is playing at Big Ears. I think Winged Wheel, because we're all in different places, it's a little bit quiet after Big Ears until we figure out where we're all going to be and when we can next collect—collect ourselves together.
Paul Jorgensen: Can you talk a little bit about what public radio, public media means to you?
Fred Thomas: Oh yeah, I'd love to. Um, public radio, public media, and in particular college radio in Ann Arbor, Michigan, kind of close to where I grew up, is WCBN 88.3 FM. Foundational. Like just set the tone for everything that I kind of went on to do with my music, with my art. Like this was the first place that I heard a lot of stuff that changed me musically. This was the first place that like I was introduced to a lot of political ideas. It's—it's been going for about 50 years now, I want to say—so between 40 and 50 years, so we kind of started around the same time. I definitely kind of—I can't understate how much of a—an impact it's had on not just me, but like every other musician I know who took their own path from Michigan. The Wolf Eyes guys were definitely like really moved by it and there's a whole kind of scene of creative, I'd say like adjacent to the folk punk thing that was happening in like the early 2000s, a lot of those people were WCBN people, the noise scene, the techno scene, it all kind of congregated around this community resource. And it wasn't limited to a certain age bracket, there—you know, like they're open to having people who are not just college kids do shows. So I learned about a lot of reggae and ska and just international music that I wouldn't have been tuned into otherwise. So that's one station, you know, that's not even like NPR or—or any that's just like the station that has a bandwidth that reaches maybe like 30 miles changed my life and so many other people's lives. So I think it's a—it's a necessary thing.
Steve Shelley: Fred, it even affected me and I didn't live in Ann Arbor, I lived north of there and still that station and all the indie stations that we—that we became to know in the states and the public radio, they—they changed our lives for the better, um, for so many of us. So—just such a great thing. And CBN specifically.
Fred Thomas: Yeah.
Steve Shelley: And WFMU in Jersey is like, you know, flagship of—of this type of thing that we're talking about. Like yeah, they continue to change lives and in Ann Arbor like I still work at the record store and like college kids come in and you can tell the ones that are kind of affiliated with WCBN are going to be in the cool bands and be the cool thinkers. So yeah, it's—it's generational.
Paul Jorgensen: Steve, earlier we were talking about because I used to live in Ferndale. So what part of Michigan are you from?
Steve Shelley: I grew up in Midland, Michigan.
Paul Jorgensen: Yeah, I spent a lot of time up there when I was a kid and then in my early professional career because that's where Dow is, am I remembering that correctly?
Steve Shelley: Sure. Very much.
Paul Jorgensen: Yeah, I have visited them several times. Try not to think about that. Um, but but otherwise beautiful part of the state and it's just a beautiful state in general. I just love it. So you were talking about Fred, the record store that you work in.
Fred Thomas: Yes.
Paul Jorgensen: And this is really a question for both of you. But so when you're traveling around playing shows in these different cities, so are you going to those similar kinds of record stores to see what they have, talk to those people, find out what kind of the music scene is from that perspective?
Fred Thomas: Um, yeah, absolutely. Like absolutely music fans first and so that involves going to the record stores, checking out like the vibe in any given city that you're in 'cause everything is so colloquial, everything's so different. I will say on our last, our European tour, I was like, "Oh, got this list of record stores in Paris that I'm going to go check out," and like we didn't—we didn't get to a single record store. I think we ate at like two restaurants. It was just like so much—we were going—going so hard for it.
Steve Shelley: We played—we played 16 shows in 16 days, so we didn't have a whole lot of time to linger at the record store counter on this trip, but it is a big part of touring life though of course.
Paul Jorgensen: I need to wrap this up, but before I go, I wanted to ask you both what other artists out there do you want to give a shoutout to that our listeners might want to check out?
Fred Thomas: Oh, this is great. Um, I'll go first just 'cause I—I've been working with a lot of newer bands in the Detroit area just this last week. It's been a pretty—you know, starting to get nice again so people are like, "I want to record, I want to like get ready for summer tours and stuff," and and the three—three bands I worked with this last week, there's a band called The Fabrics who are based between Ypsilanti and New Orleans, they're pretty intense like kind of like trans, twee, queer like revolutionary, but like soft-hearted music band. Love them. A band called Dick Texas who we actually played a show with, um, they recorded their second record on Tuesday night in about five hours. We helped them do that. It was like a—a really beautiful studio session. And there's a band called Ratpaws, which is the work of a songwriter named Eleanor Dumouchel and she's just fantastic. Fans of anything in this band could be your life will want to check out Ratpaws.
Steve Shelley: Wow. I'm impressed with with Fred's up-to-date list. Um, I'll go back in time. While we were putting the together this record, this Desert So Green record, I was really enjoying some of the mixes and songs of this Brazilian artist, Erasmo Carlos, and I was always pushing some of these songs onto Fred to check them out and for vibe or whatever. So so Erasmo Carlos has been on my mind for the last last months.
Paul Jorgensen: Nice, outstanding. All right, I'm going to have to put some links into the show notes then so folks can go and track these these artists down. I want to thank you both for taking time out of your busy schedules to talk with me and talk to the audience here in Chattanooga.
Fred Thomas: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having good questions.
Paul Jorgensen: Oh, I—thank you. And really looking forward to seeing y'all up in Knoxville for Big Ears. It's going to be great. So travel safe and thank you both so much.
Fred Thomas: You too. Thanks a lot.
Steve Shelley: Take care. See you later.
This transcript was generated by AI and spot edited.
