Songfacts®:

• "Heart Like a Wheel" is a stark, poetic breakup ballad written by Anna McGarrigle that compares a damaged heart to a bent bicycle wheel that will never roll true again. "I was thinking about a bicycle, and it's true that once you've bent that wheel, you ain't ever going to roll right again," she told NPR. "And that - I thought of the heart as being the same way. And at the time, I was having a bit of heartbreak, so..."
  
  Asked for details, Anna declined. One suspects the wheel in question had run over something emotionally sharp.
• This was the first song that Anna McGarrigle wrote. "Kate had told me that the acts she had seen in New York City were singing their own songs," she told Uncut magazine. "It was the singer-songwriter period. The next time I was at my mother's, I sat down and wrote 'Heart Like a Wheel.'"
• Before the sisters formally became Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Kate had been touring the northeastern coffeehouse circuit with musician and producer Roma Baran, playing rooms from Caffè Lena to Greenwich Village. When they came through town, Anna nervously unveiled her new composition. Kate and Baran dressed it up with piano and cello and slipped it into their set. Thus, the wobbly wheel began to roll.
• The song was first recorded by McKendree Spring in 1972, but found its wider orbit when Linda Ronstadt used it as the title track of her 1974 breakthrough album. Her version helped Kate & Anna McGarrigle land their own deal with Warner Bros. and release their self-titled debut.
• The sisters' self-titled debut, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, features Anna's lead vocal on "Heart Like A Wheel," with Kate and sister Jane providing luminous support. Produced by Joe Boyd, a man whose CV includes Fairport Convention and Nick Drake, the recording became their calling card and a cornerstone of their reputation as literate, emotionally fearless writers.
• Critics promptly swooned. The album earned an A in Christgau's Record Guide, glowing notices in Rolling Stone, and was named Rock Album of the Year by Melody Maker in 1976. Decades later it was canonized anew with the 2016 Polaris Heritage Prize (1976–1985 division), confirming that bent wheels, when properly sung about, can travel a very long way indeed.
• Kate & Anna McGarrigle's recording of "Heart Like A Wheel" is used on the soundtrack to Noah Baumbach's 2005 film The Squid and the Whale. It plays in the scene where teenage Frank Berkman runs away to the home of his mother, Joan, and finds her having a romantic evening with her new partner, Ivan, which drives home how deeply his parents' divorce has wounded him.