Strand of Oaks: "This is the only thing I have true freedom over in this world"

Amid all the shit, and dirt and grubby confessions that Strand of Oaks’ Tim Showalter shares with us on HEAL, his fourth album, there’s a positive message to be found. Perhaps the album title gives it away, maybe it’s the reference to “magic” starting on opening track and searing rocker “Goshen 97” (named after Showalter’s home town) or maybe the paean to the healing power of music and Jason Molina tribute that is “JM” is where it finally hits home. For me, it’s those lines from the gloriously chiming “Shut In” that do it for me: listening to it for the first time, I literally punched the air with delight when those words came in and the music soared. That was evidence enough of HEAL’s positivity and overriding anthemic qualities.

In a review for another site, I wrote that HEAL “allows us to process and evaluate our own lives, even to inspire us to greater things. HEAL is Showalter’s gift to us, a record that sings of the healing power of music and love and finds Strand of Oaks peeking out from the shadows of Pope Kildragon‘s gothic gloom, plugging in and letting go.” I stand by that statement even more now, many listens in and understanding that Showalter isn’t ashamed to use 80s-sounding synths, or honest-almost-to-the-point-of-corny lyrics about what music can achieve, or to make pointed nods to his musical heroes.

When I call Showalter at his home in Pennsylvania, he’s not living the rock star lifestyle his teenage self imagined while singing “[Smashing] Pumpkins in the mirror” as detailed on “Goshen 97”. Tim is spending the morning watching documentaries about hippy cults and coming down off of last night’s weed cookies: “it’s definitely not a rock and roll life!” he laughs.

I say to Tim that he must be fairly delighted with the response to HEAL given it seems have been almost universally well-received? “I’m excited for people to hear this record,” he admits. “It was a challenge, and I feel like in the past when I put out records it was a surprise when someone said to me they’d heard a song! Where did you hear it? There’s nowhere for you to get this music! So it’s a new world for me to have this much exposure, it’s amazing.”

What strikes you about HEAL, from the variety of musical styles, to the disarming lyrics, is just how honest a record Showalter has produced. Compared to the fantastical story telling of Pope Kildragon, Showalter’s latest record is as personal as he’s made or has ever made, and that’s partly down to becoming sick of other people’s dishonesty: “I think I just got to the saturation point of irony and satire and all these things that exist in indie rock that I never believed in myself,” he explains. “I mean, I was probably made fun of by the cooler kids but I was like ‘wait, I mean everything that I’m saying!’ If I want to make a guitar solo, it’s not based on irony or nostalgia, I just want to make an anthemic song.” It’s clear straight from the off, with a solo from one of his heroes J Mascis on “Goshen 97”, that Showalter isn’t someone who’s afraid of wearing his influences on his sleeve. “You know, I love New Order and I’m not gonna try and hide that I love them,” says the Indiana native, with passion. “It’s just gonna be on the record. I think it was a philosophy I had at the beginning where…there are just so many fucking rules! I thought I got into music to not have rules in my life and now people are like ‘oh, you’re a singer-songwriter now so you can only make records like that’…FUCK THAT! I’m gonna make whatever record I want to! This is the only thing I have true freedom over in this world, so I might as well take advantage of that.”

The title track, the synth-heavy “Heal”, is an example of Showalter’s lyrical honesty. I say to Tim that it feels unedited, like a stream of consciousness and although it might be seen as corny (“I know you cheated on me / But I cheated on myself”) or whatever you get carried along by it because you know it’s from the heart. Did he change the way he approached his song writing this time around? “My instinct as a song writer is to edit and to go over it endless and say ‘oh this can get better, this word could be changed, and this guitar part could sound better’” he says, “but with this one I didn’t want to do any of that. And because of that I liked it more! The minute you start editing something, and granted it works for other records and I might do that in the future, the record wouldn’t have had any power to it. All the songs would have been lost and it would have sounded bullshit!” And what about the lyrics; was there ever a worry that honesty would be mistaken for cheesiness? “I acknowledge completely that I’m walking a very thin line between being almost corny,” begins Tim, “and being sincere and earnest, but I believe it’s earnest because I didn’t change anything. I did exactly what I wanted but at any point where I might have compromised it would have sounded cheesy. I’ve read reviews where people do think that way but I can really stand behind this record and listen to it and say there’s really nothing I would change – there’s not one part in the whole forty-whatever minutes that I regret, and that to me is as much as I can ask for.”

It’s only as I’m talking to Tim that I realise that HEAL reminds me of Okkervil River’s most recent album, The Silver Gymnasium. Not that it sounds like that band, but that Showalter and Will Sheff took the same approach when writing. Sheff explained to me that The Silver Gymnasium, as well as being his most personal record, benefitted from spending less time in the studio and trusting instincts and first takes: “Oh man, I’ve been a huge fan of Okkervil River since they started,” says Tim, “but I’m only just now catching up with records, and I really need to listen to that. The one thing I’ve always liked about his [Sheff’s] song writing is that you can tell he loves music. I think he was a music reviewer back in the day or whatever.” He was indeed; we spent about five minutes analysing why “I Want to Know What Love Is” by Foreigner is such a brilliant song…”I love people who are grown up enough to say ‘I’m not playing the cool card anymore!’ exclaims Tim. “Like, I’m not gonna act like I don’t love something. There’s this weird problem that I face with people who I hang out with in the music circles where ‘coolness’ is bred because of insecurity. They’re scared that someone is gonna make fun of them because they unabashedly love…fuckin’…The Killers or something. You’re not allowed to say that! You’re allowed to say you love Drake for some reason, but you’re not allowed to say you love The Killers. It’s all radio music…why are you allowed to love Beyonce purely and unabashedly but you can’t say ‘oh my god the Coldplay song is awesome!’ It may not be awesome…but the one thing I wanna teach people out of this record is STOP GIVING A FUCK ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK. Just like something to like it! Appreciate it and enjoy it!”

The danger with being so honest is that you might hurt some feelings along the way, and on HEAL Showalter is incredibly honest about his own shortcomings but he’s equally as honest about what he thinks of other people. In particular, his wife and father are mentioned in unflattering terms at points across the record. Was he worried about the fallout from this? “I think, inherently, I’m just a really selfish person!” laughs Tim. “I wrote these songs because they made me feel good,” he continues, “and I was so focused on that that I didn’t do a very good job considering other people. Especially when it came to my wife; there were a lot of tense moments in the Showalter household as I presented some of these tracks!” So how did he get away with it? “Part of it was me saying ‘look, you married a singer-songwriter, you know I’m going to take what this life is and make it public’. Never did I expect to make it so severely honest! It’s dangerously honest at some points, but luckily no-one’s stopped calling me.”

What about Showalter’s father, who comes in for some sharp words on “JM”: I don’t know how much my dad even listens to my records; I think he still wonders why I’m not putting Eric Clapton songs on my records – Dad, I kinda write my own songs! With my wife, that took some gentle talks…but you know what, she’s such an awesome woman that she’s just ‘no, this is part of what you do’. She was sad at first, obviously, but ultimately she’s the most important person I have and she said that if I believe so much in what I’m doing then I have to make it happen. I’m really scared she’s gonna make her own record in response! ‘Here’s my side of the story about my drunk asshole husband!’”

Anyone who knows me knows how much of a fan of the late Jason Molina I am, so it was fairly tough for me to wait ten long minutes of our conversation before I decided to raise the subject of the song “JM”, Showalter’s brilliant tribute to the sadly-missed Magnolia Electric Co man. Showalter has already been on the record about Molina’s influence over him and his career, and it extends beyond just one track on HEAL. You’ll read more about that, but I first express my love for Jason to Tim: “Oh man, same here, same here!” he says without hesitation. “It’s just – and still is – devastating not to have him. I didn’t know him personally but if you were a fan of his, like I assume you are, it just sounds like he’s your best friend. You refer to him as ‘Jason’; you refer to his lyrics like you were in the room with him when he wrote them about you.” But that’s how “JM” sounds as well, though – another aspect of Showalter’s brand of honesty and as I’m speaking to him I get the feeling he’d be an excellent friend. Full of problems, like the rest of us, but he’d be there for you when the going gets tough. But back to Jason and that song….”Again, with that song I can see that it could easily be a cheesy thing,“ admits Tim, “a tribute to my hero but I fucking meant it so much and I needed to acknowledge the fact that this guy is no longer here but his lyrics have been my mission statement for my life. He didn’t give up, and he didn’t want to give up…his body gave up.” We discuss the word “try”, which appears constantly in Molina’s music, and it’s something that, I say to Tim, I also find in Strand of Oaks lyrics: “His lyrics are the most…..” he starts, hesitantly. “You know, I hate people with this knee-jerk reaction ‘oh it’s sad music, it must be hopeless’…no, NO! It’s more hopeful than a rave, or something like that! It’s the reality of life that he showed, constantly. Life is a big fucking pile of shit sometimes, but that’s what your life is and you work through it and you try and get out of it and try to destroy those bad times.”

I always tried to make time to listen to Magnolia Electric Co at least once a week when Jason Molina was alive, but since his death I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve played it. It’s not so much that it’s too hard to listen to, more that the fall-out from it is hope; forgetting that he’s gone and wondering what new music there is to come from him because he’s always been there and his music has always been there. Like the line from “JM” where Showalter sings “I had your sweet tunes to play”. I say to Tim that it’s hard, right? “I know! That song is homage,” he explains. “It’s a reference to what you just said – his songs were always playing. And people gave me a hard time again: ‘why do you listen to him when you’re so sad?’ It’s not depressing! I would listen to it in my darkest days, and it was just there. It was comforting to me, to know. It’s losing your hero; when I knew he wasn’t going to make any more records it meant there’d not be another soundtrack to the shitty days I’m gonna have, there’s no new song that’s gonna explain this for me. I hope he knew how much people liked him and that he was aware of that…because I think he cared. I remember the first time I saw him; he’d sold out a pretty small club in Chicago and I was sure this guy was a rock star.” It’s a generational thing, isn’t it? You only get one of those people to love in your life time, and ours was Jason, right? Showalter agrees: “I saw him play in front of 200 people and I thought I’d seen my version of Neil Young. You know, Neil Young’s my dad’s age but this guy is my age and he’s happening now! There’s no words that can explain how powerful that was for me…I can’t go back to his music, I haven’t listened to him in over a year. It sounds like I’m exaggerating but it’s just really difficult to listen to.”

Tim goes on to explain that Molina’s influence hangs over HEAL as a whole, acting as a guide for the overarching theme of the album – music: “He provided the foundation for this record; you know, the record has these parts about my wife or other things in my past but truly what the record is about is music,” he says, “listening to music and acknowledging the fact that it’s the only higher power or religion that’s ever brought me comfort in this crazy fucking life.” Is there a certain Songs:Ohia record that Tim remembers particularly soundtracking a moment in his life? “I remember playing The Lioness and I was just on the edge,” he reveals. “A girl dumped me and broke my heart and I was listening to that…I heard that ‘Coxcomb Red’ song and I was like…that was the decision. I’m moving away, I’m getting out of this small town and moving somewhere else – and that was the record I listened to in my car on the fourteen hour drive to my new town. Everything was so close to my own experiences.”

We discuss the new expanded Strand of Oaks and how excited Showalter is about taking the band on the road, promising each other that we’ll “throw down a few” when he comes to Glasgow in October in the same venue I first saw Jason Molina play and I wonder if Tim and Jason shared fairly similar backgrounds, given they were from the neighbouring states of Indiana and Ohio – a blue collar family? “Yeah, my dad was a car salesman – it’s not like I came from [laughs] college professors with Captain Beefheart records! It was nice Midwestern people that I grew up with…I think there’s something in the Midwest that I’m trying to put my finger on and it’ll probably take me my whole life. There’s this loneliness that happens but there’s also this work ethic…like, I do feel bad but I’m gonna have to work through it. I’m probably not gonna go to therapy, I probably won’t seek the healthier routes so if I’m in a bad mood I’m gonna make it better through work. I think that’s the equivalent of the music Jason made, and hopefully that I try and make.”

HEAL is out now on Dead Oceans. Tim and Strand of Oaks begin a tour of the UK on Sep 28, ending at London's Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen - info and tickets here.