Strand Of Oaks (the project of Timothy Showalter) has shared a new song titled “Jimi & Stan.” It is the latest offering from his forthcoming album “In Heaven”, due out October 1st on Galacticana Records via Thirty Tigers. Listen below.
“Jimi & Stan,” like other songs on In Heaven, deals with grief and the loss of a loved one. Showalter explains in a press release the meaning behind the song: “My sweetest buddy/cat Stan sadly passed away. And the only way I could describe my love for him was imagining Stan and Jimi Hendrix hanging out in heaven together smiling and going to shows and having the best time.”
Very proud to share my new song “Jimi & Stan”. If you’ll allow me to get personal for a moment. Stan was my beloved cat. In 2018, Stan got cancer right around the time Sues mom was killed in a car accident. Our home was filled with immeasurable sadness. I believe Stan held on as long as he could just to be there for us until finally saying goodbye. In my grief I tried to imagine a Heaven that Stan so rightfully deserved. And that Heaven is Stan hanging out with Jimi Hendrix going to shows and having a warm spot to look at the galaxy. I wanted the song to be a joyous sendoff for my sweetest buddy. It’s also a song for all of us who have lost and can only dream that those that we love can live in our hearts forever. I cry every time I hear this song but I know it’s all from love. Thank you for listening and please call the people you love and hug your pets. I cherish you all.
Upon the announcement of In Heaven, Showalter had earlier shared the song “Galacticana” His previous album, “Erasureland” came out in 2019
Strand Of Oaks (Timothy Showalter) will release a new studio album “In Heaven” due on October 1st. The album features the lead track and single, “Galacticana.”
Showalter recorded In Heaven in October 2020 at Invisible Creature in Los Angeles with producer Kevin Ratterman, who also produced 2019’s Eraserland. The sessions followed Showalter’s relocating from Philadelphia to Austin, Texas and the unexpected deaths of Showalter’s wife Sue’s mother in a car accident and the couples’ beloved cat Stan.
Showalter played guitar and, for the first time since 2014’s Heal, synthesizers. My Morning Jacket guitarist Carl Bromel and keyboardist Bo Koster, who contributed to Eraserland, were brought back for the In Heaven sessions. Ratterman played drums alongside bassist Cedric LeMoyne. Violinist Scott Moore appears on the new album and special guest James Iha (The Smashing Pumpkins) added guitar and vocals to the track “Easter.”
I am beyond thrilled to announce my newest record In Heaven. Hard to put into words how much these songs mean to me and the love that went into creating them. Over this tough year or so this Oaks community has brought me endless strength and made me feel less alone. The first single Galacticana is for all of you, it’s my love letter to all of us. Please do me a favour and if you like this band/song share this with your friends. You can pre order and listen at our website. Let me know what you think in the comments, as always I’d love to hear from you! You all mean the world to me, Best tim
“In Heaven” was created with so much love and my greatest hope is that it connects with people and provides a momentary space for reflection, joy, catharsis and whatever else someone might be looking for in their life,” Showalter stated. “Music is magic and I feel like the luckiest person in the world that I’m allowed to share it.”
Strand Of Oaks will tour the U.S. in support of In Heaven throughout October and November.
Timothy Showalter recently moved to Austin and explained how good the change has been for him. Additionally, Tim has stopped drinking and detailed how he’s reaping the rewards of that decision. The pandemic hit just as Showalter was about to take time to work on new music. He discussed his song writing process as well as the ambient album, Ambient For Change that Strand Of Oaks released in June.
While Tim acknowledged all the strife and struggle going on in the world, Showalter spoke about the positive attitude he’s taken towards the future. Showalter called it his “survival mode” to talk about the future and projects in a hopeful way. Another topic hit upon by Showalter was Tim’s appreciation for the jam scene and the band Phish in particular. Tim explained how much Phish’s Dinner And A Movie weekly video broadcasts mean to him. He noted that Tuesday nights are his most social time of the week. Other subjects discussed are ways both artists and fans can help the live music infrastructure,
Timothy Showalter was done. Despite the acclaim that greeted Strand Of Oaks’ fifth album, Hard Love, the guitarist and songwriter found himself in a hole, and was on the verge of quitting music altogether. Then his friends in My Morning Jacket decided to pull him out, dragging him into the studio and providing an elite backing band to create his most impressive album yet, Eraserland.
“I didn’t really wanna do it anymore,” says Showalter, the artist also known as Strand Of Oaks. That’s quite an attention-grabbing admission, but in these clickbait-heavy times, he’s keen to emphasise that this isn’t just a good marketing line. “It’s not for dramatic press. I know that’s how this game works – put a fireworks show up so people wanna write about it. But when I was trying to explain the record to people, that’s the only way that I could. I think it was an identity crisis.”
Back in 2017, Tim was promoting and touring his new album, Hard Love, but despite the album being well received by both critics and fans, something wasn’t right. “I released Hard Love a year after I made it, and I was singing about someone who I wasn’t anymore,” he reflects. “I was pretty wild for a little while there. But over the course of that year making Hard Love and being home, I changed in a good way. I loved the record and playing those songs live, but I had this idea of, ‘What am I doing? I’ve been doing this for 10 years. Who am I?’”
The changes may have been positive, but it coincided with Tim finding himself stuck in a rut, and unable to write new material, which in turn brought up a host of other issues. “Most of my life, playing guitar and singing, and writing songs, was an escape route out of anxiety and life,” he admits candidly. “That was my safe place… and then I was like, ‘Shit…’ Because being a musician is most of my identity – if you were to speak to friends or family, they would say: ‘Oh, he was really depressed.’ Like clinically depressed! But I equated it to, ‘I’m just not feeling the tunes right now!’”
Such was Tim’s disconnect from music at this time, he barely registered his label’s decision to take the wealth of unused material from the Hard Love sessions to create a brand-new album, Harder Love, which came out in 2018. “I forget that Harder Love even came out!” he exclaims. “I had very little to do with that. There was some good stuff on there, and the label kind of approached me and said: ‘People should at least hear these songs…’ And I’m like, ‘That sounds good. I’m gonna hike in the woods for a while!’”
And then something quite remarkable happened. “I got a phone call from my manager saying: ‘Are you making a record with My Morning Jacket?’ And I went, ‘What are you talking about?!’” Tim remembers. “He said: ‘WelI, I just got a call from all of them and they say they have studio time booked…’ and I didn’t have any songs written!”
Renowned indie-rock bands don’t just go around booking studio time with songwriters on a whim, and what was actually happening was something of a rock ’n’ roll intervention…
“They’re friends of mine, and the producer Kevin [Ratterman] is also a dear friend, and to their endless credit they caught wind that I wasn’t in a good spot, and they dropped everything,” he reflects wistfully. “For Chrissakes, Bo [Koster] the keyboard player… he’s Roger Waters’ keyboard player! And he had two weeks off in the midst of the The Wall Tour, and he decided to spend those two weeks with me in a studio in Louisville. It’s the last place he should have been – he should have been on a fuckin’ beach or something!
“My epiphany truly started when all these people started to come to my aid, and my first inclination was, ‘I need to write good songs, ’cos I can’t give this band mediocre shit!’ So I began writing the opposite of how I usually write – unselfishly! It gave me enough room to get out of my own head, and because of that, it became a pure form of expression that I couldn’t have planned on. And the songs just came – I don’t know where from! I still need to learn chords for half of them. I don’t remember writing them. I hope I did!”
Working with a very short deadline was a new one for Tim – “Sometimes I’ve written songs where there’s like a three-year gap between writing a song and putting out a record,” he admits – and with just a few short weeks to write an album, he headed for the beach to write…
“I love beaches in the off-season,” Tim explains. “I don’t know why, it’s just romantic. It looks like death, but a beautiful death! And the songs just kinda varied depending on my mood from day to day, or even what the weather was like at the beach! Like if it was a rainy day, it would be more introspective, but if it was sunny, the major chords would come flying. It all happened so fast.”
If the writing and demoing process was a breeze, when it came to recording, the reality of the shoes he was filling rendered things a lot less comfortable. “I had a panic attack the first day at the studio, because we recorded everything live in this huge room, and I was standing where [MMJ frontman] Jim James should be standing!” Tim recalls. “And if anyone knows Jim James, I can’t sing like him – 99 per cent of the planet that’s ever existed can’t sing like him. I’m like, ‘What am I doing here!? I shouldn’t be allowed in this party!’
“But that night, the guys went for dinner and I stayed at the studio because I wanted to get my guitar tone working. And while I was there on my own, I walked around the studio and I saw that they all had extensive notes that they’d written. That to me, was like this moment of like, ‘Oh, they are so involved with this.’ This is not like when a label sets you up with a bunch of studio musicians. These are friends and they’re invested. Yes, they’re extremely accomplished and you look up to them, but this is not the moment to be starstruck. This is the moment to collaborate.”
With that hurdle overcome, the chemistry between Tim and the rest of the band was immediate and the recording process was remarkably smooth.
“It’s a testament to what good musicians they are,” he enthuses. “We really set ourselves up for failure, because we’d never played together before! But outside of maybe a few overdubs, everything was live. Even if it was nine minutes long. That’s the performance.”
Operating with that one-take mindset really gave Showalter an appreciation for how good his new backing band was, and one member in particular. “Tommy [Blankenship], the bass player, is a perfect bass player.” he insists. “After five days, a few of us went out for dinner, and he went somewhere else, and we had this realisation… ‘Guys, Tommy hasn’t messed up yet…’ He never hit a wrong note! You’re supposed to do something wrong, to make everyone else feel better! It’s like, ‘Tommy, please, I messed up my own lyrics on that last track!’”
When it came to the album’s guitar sounds, Tim found himself in the unusual position of not being the primary lead guitarist, with MMJ’s Carl Broemel filling that chair. “Usually, I have a ‘space station’ pedalboard and everything. But my stuff was really simple, it was strictly for rhythm,” Tim recalls. “I was mostly playing a Frankenstein Telecaster – that for some reason I put mini-humbuckers on – through what looked like a Magnatone, but it’s got a single 12 in it – I don’t know if one of Kevin’s friends made it or what.”
Taking a back seat on the lead guitar side did give Showalter a chance to appreciate the creativity and uniqueness of Broemel’s playing, however…
“He has a Duesenberg that’s like a tour de force of tone,” Tim enthuses. “But his secret is that he would be sitting down in front of this pedalboard, and he had an Echoplex. And as he was soloing on stuff like Weird Ways or Forever Chords, his right hand was constantly working that as he was playing.”
Showalter has developed a reputation as a fan of extended jams, exploratory solos and a general tendency to wig out whenever possible, but by not really playing solos on the album, he began to look at things from a different perspective.
“The thing I love about Eraserland is that there’s very little jamming,” he admits. “It’s extremely structured, and I think that to me always felt unappealing in the past. But when you think about The Dark Side Of The Moon, in your memory, it’s almost as if Gilmour is soloing the whole time. Like an epic jam. But then when you go back and listen to it, it’s actually so composed and orchestrated.
“In my past records, like Hard Love, I was just like, ‘Let’s just jam, fuck it all, start the track!’ And that was fun and all, but for something like Forever Chords, we had it down to a measure. Technically, there are only like three solos on this album.”
One of those three solos was reserved for a very special guest – Jason Isbell. The guitarist is another friend who wanted to help Tim get back in the saddle, and leant his considerable skills to the track Moon Landing.
“Jason and I go way back,” Tim explains. “I played shows with him maybe 10 years ago? We’ve remained friends and played off and on together since, and he’s a wonderful person. He has such a beautiful voice and writes award-winning songs, and we sent him the most crazy and dissonant song on the record.
“He really wanted to be on it, but was touring so he couldn’t come to Louisville, so we sent him the track after we were done with it, and we were like, ‘Well, what’s he gonna do with this?’ And then he came back with like a Hendrix-level Machine Gun solo! And I think that I’m most proud of that – because you see it with him live, but I want more people to know that he’s one of the most inventive players around.
“My god, if you listen to the raw track of Moon Landing and his solo, there’s things in there that sound like he’s eating his guitar or something! How is he doing that?! And it was bone dry – no delay or reverb, or anything, just deadly tone. Love that.”
After coming so close to jacking it all in before Eraserland reignited his creativity and love of music, we can’t help but conclude our chat by asking Tim how he’s feeling about the whole thing now…
“I wanna make more records,” he affirms. “But I have to put this album to rest as a piece of art in order to open my brain up to make the new. I always tell friends that the two weeks after I get the master, I have this golden moment where I listen to my own record, and I listen to it, and I like it… and then it’s done forever. I’ve given it to the people.
“It feels good to know that maybe in six months, I’ll be able to maybe start the next one, but I just need to have that moment to let go. It took me a long time to let go of Hard Love, but that enabled me to do this, which was such a positive experience. Hopefully, I won’t have to go through that again this time, though… these dramatic stories, I’m just tired of them!”
Following on from the 2014 excellent album “Heal” , Strand of Oaks is set to release a new record “Hard Love” on 17th February 2017 on Dead Oceans. To say we’re fans of Timothy Showalter is an understatement . . Anyway, the new album kicks ass. Have a listen to the first single.
Tim had this to say, “Some records are built like monuments, set in stone,” says Showalter. “I want this record to be burned in effigy, in celebration of the limited time we have on this earth.”
Hard Love walks a tightrope of emotions — from rock ‘n’ roll abandon to harrowing self-reflection — and Showalter has lived every minute of it. From a life-changing psychedelic awakening at the Boogie Festival in Australia (“On The Hill“) to his own domestic troubles (“Hard Love”) and the near-death of his brother from cardiac arrest (“Taking Acidand Talking With My Brother“), Hard Love is a sledgehammer of a record rife with unrestrained sonic expression.
Written and conceptualized during Showalter’s post-tour break as he reveled in what he considered to be a life-changing experience, the initial sessions for Hard Love were scrapped. Showalter brought in producer Nicolas Vernhes to capture the loose, hedonistic vibe he was searching for. “In a time of calculation and overthinking, I wanted to bring back the raw, impulsive nature that is the DNA of so many records I love,” says Showalter, who draws from his love of Creation Records, Trojan dub tapes and Jane’s Addiction throughout the album’s nine tracks.
But that rocking intensity is tempered by the wounded ballad “Cry,” a sobering moment of clarity that serves as the emotional fulcrum of the record. It’s this strain of honesty and self-reflection that helps mark ‘Hard Love’ as the most fearless work of Showalter’s career .
My Morning Jacket released their new album “The Waterfall” earlier this year, and now Timothy Showalter Aka Strand Of Oaks has been opening for them this fall on their tour in support of the album. Yesterday, before a show in Boston later that day, Timothy Showalter stopped by Philadelphia radio station WXPN to take on MMJ’s “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)” off of 2011’s Circuital. and it’s one of the most tender moments on the album. Showalter highlights the touching aspects of the track by gently strumming his guitar as accompaniment to his sturdy voice. He has to drop it a bit out of Jim James’ range, but it doesn’t make his version any less pretty.
Showalter seems to have connected a bit more with their older material. Over the weekend, Strand of Oaks delivering this acoustic rendition of “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)”.
Timothy Showalter with his band Aka “Strand Of Oaks” on KUTX Radio in Austin Texas performing the track “Goshen’97” with Tims Neil Young and J Mascis type of grungy guitars taken from his new album “Heal” the song title is the name of his home town in Indiana
Second song released from the new STRAND OF OAKS album titled “HEAL” Strand of Oaks aka TIMOTHY SHOWALTER hails from Goshen in Indiana http://www.strandofoaks.bandcamp.com
The Fat Angel Sings 