Human Wheels is the 12th album by American singer-songwriter and musician John Mellencamp. Released on Mercury Records in 1993, it peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard 200. The single "What If I Came Knocking" was Mellencamp's last No. 1 single on the Album Rock Tracks chart, staying atop for two weeks in the summer of 1993.
The title track was borne out of a poem Mellencamp's friend George Green wrote as a eulogy delivered at the grave site upon the death of his grandfather. “He had no intention of using it as a song,” Mellencamp said in a 2008 interview with the Bloomington Herald Times. “He had me read it and I said, ‘These are the best lyrics you ever wrote.’ He said, ‘They’re not lyrics’ and I said ‘I can make them lyrics.’ I took it and kind of cut it up and wrote the chorus.”
The album is dedicated to band member John Cascella, who died unexpectedly about halfway through production.
Read more about Human Wheels: Track Listing, Personnel, Charts
Famous quotes containing the words human and/or wheels:
“It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)