Big Wheel

Cass McCombs writes songs that feel like letters from someone you used to know, sent from an address you can’t quite remember agreeing to. “Big Wheel” is the longest and strangest thing on Wit’s End — a hypnotic, faintly menacing drift of a song built around a guitar figure that never quite resolves.

There’s a specific quality to McCombs’s singing: he sounds like he’s telling you something important while looking past your shoulder at something you haven’t noticed yet. Six and a half minutes of that is exactly the company you want for the stretch of highway between one version of your life and the next.