“Steep Angles On The Back Wheels” is our first taste of the 2020 forthcoming full-length from singer/songwriter Carter Tanton. The soon-to-be-released nine-song album was recorded minimally — using one mic, one guitar, and one piano — in the empty rooms of his Baltimore childhood home while it was on the market waiting to be sold.
He says the song takes inspiration from the 1990 Sinead O’Connor single “Black Boys on Mopeds.” In a press release, Tanton describes the inspiration for today's featured track:
"At night during summer I would wake up to the sound of the 12 O’clock Boys, a black dirt bike racing crew, humming across North Avenue just a few blocks from where I lived. Their path takes them past Greenmount Cemetery where John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, is buried. This song was written during a time in Baltimore when, in response to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, our mayor had ordered lingering Confederate statues throughout the city to be removed in the middle of the night. One of these statues was less than 50 yards from my door and another in the park where I learned to throw a baseball with my dad. They’d always been there, and I had never bothered to read the memorialized script wrapping around their marbled pedestals. I felt bowled over by the confluence of so many divergent elements of American culture — the repurposing of dirt bikes for city racing, with the man who killed the president to defend the slavery system buried within earshot of the screaming engines, while the country reckoned with itself over the integrity or insult of Confederate statues still standing — whether they were a mournful history preserved or latent sympathies eager to be revived. Flowing from Sinead’s song, a maturing from mopeds to dirt bikes seemed a potent metaphor for the rising stakes in our cultural clashes, and the elastic fabric of American life."
