John Lucas

I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

His picture is on the cover, but Timothy Showalter insists that he is not, in fact, the person primarily responsible for the existence of the latest Strand of Oaks album, Eraserland.

In fact, there was a point, sometime between the release of his last LP (2017’s Hard Love) and the start of the Eraserland sessions, when Showalter was pretty certain he didn’t want to make another record. Ever. It was a time of soul-searching for the 36-year-old singer-songwriter. He had always defined himself as a musician, but suddenly that didn’t seem like enough to sustain him. He wanted to know who Timothy Showalter really was.

It might be somewhat ironic, then, that the very thing that helped Showalter through his existential crisis was music. Just how cathartic did writing and recording Eraserland turn out to be? Well, consider that the album opens with the line “I can’t feel it anymore” (from “Weird Ways”) and closes with “I hope it never ends” (from “Forever Chords”).

Showalter gives full credit to his friend Carl Broemel, who happens to be the guitarist for My Morning Jacket, for pulling him out of his slump.

“I had no songs,” Showalter says when the Straight reaches him on the road in Birmingham, Alabama. “Carl kind of reached out through the mist and said, ‘Hey, if you ever want to play songs or write some music together…’ And I said, ‘Of course,’ and then he spent the rest of the day contacting the rest of the people on the album and booking the studio time. And when I found out it was a reality, surprisingly, then I was faced with ‘Oh, I need to write songs now.’ And I think that was the true jumping-off point. I wrote songs for them as opposed to me, and I wanted to give them as good of songs as I could create at that moment. I’d never had that approach before, and I think it allowed for the songs to maybe evolve and change from the pattern I’d done in the past.”

It didn’t hurt that among the people Broemel tapped to help make the album were his My Morning Jacket bandmates: bassist Tom Blankenship, drummer Patrick Hallahan, and keyboardist Bo Koster. The result is perhaps the finest record Showalter has ever released under the Strand of Oaks moniker, with highlights including the fade-into-you ballad “Keys”, the lysergically motorik “Hyperspace Blues”, the heartland-rocking “Ruby”, and the mournfully dreamy hymn that is the title track.

Throughout the recording process, Showalter found himself in awe of his collaborators—not just for their chops, but also for their restraint.

“As a fan of their music, I was game for them to just be on all cylinders the whole time,” he says. “I want to see Carl Broemel play a solo for 45 minutes, and Patrick do drum fills and whatnot, but what was so amazing about how they interpreted a song was that it was almost what they didn’t play that made the record so special. They all were so in tune with their own part, but also how it fit in with the song as a whole. It’s just a testament to them as musicians, but more importantly as human beings, because it was so based around love. I think they truly loved the idea of working together, and the four of them are such a special unit.”

In the end, Showalter found himself a step closer to answering the questions that had left him immobilized before Broemel and company lit a fire under him. Those questions, he says, included “Why am I here?” and “Why am I doing this?”

“Not just musicwise, but why am I doing all of this?” he clarifies. “And why am I who I am? My producer, Kevin Ratterman, made this good point. He said, ‘This record, lyrically, sounds like a breakup letter or a suicide note to your ego.’ I really think that makes sense, and I think that might be what Eraserland means. You have the power to say ‘I’m not going to be willed into this existence that may have trapped me with patterns or behaviour or inherited anxieties,’ and all of those issues we face constantly. It’s that kind of liberating freedom, like, ‘I can break this cycle—or try to, at least.’ ”

What’s most striking about talking to Showalter—aside from how unflinchingly honest he is—is how much he sounds at peace with himself and his place in the world. It’s as if he has come to the conclusion that defining himself as a maker of music isn’t so bad after all.

“My biggest fear in life is to not have purpose,” he says. “And I think that’s part of the reason why I really identify so much as being a musician. Because I love playing music and everything, but it gives me a reason to exist.

“I always say that my concept of success is just having something to do next, and a reason to do something next,” he adds. “And I felt like before I made Eraserland, I didn’t have that, and I didn’t have the confidence nor the reason to do that. And that’s why I’m so thankful, especially to Carl for giving me purpose again. And now I can be on the road and get to connect with people every night and talk to the really good people who come out to my shows. And that just reinvigorates the whole sense of purpose even more.”