Photo by Anna Kaminski. 

Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary, with the famous lines "Big wheels keep on turnin' / Proud Mary keep on burnin'", was patched together from a string of riffs and lines John Fogerty had noted down during his time in The National Guard. When Solomon Burke recorded his soulful version of the song, these same riffs and lines took on a whole other meaning of African-American liberation on board a ship destined for the deep South. Proud Mary never made it onto our playlist for the Wheels Issue, but its story of motion and change is nevertheless alive within the climbing bass lines of Novella's ethereal Land: Gone, Lianne La Havas' Unstoppable and Lizzy Mercier Descloux's wonderfully strange Jim on the Move.

Listen to while on a bike, bus or train, or treading the sturdy soles of your feet, rolling out of a crowded city and into an unknown town.