John Lucas

From the Archives: Howard Shore (2010)

May 5, 2020

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.)

Many film scores have embedded themselves deeply in popular culture. Who can hear the music from Jaws or Psycho, for example, without instantly being flooded with images from those classic movies? Few scores have become truly iconic as quickly as the ones Canadian composer Howard Shore created for director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, however.

Shore’s music for the series garnered a number of awards, including three Oscars, three Grammys, and two Golden Globes, and it has been showcased in several successful live versions.

One of these, The Lord of the Rings Symphony, will bring followers of Frodo Baggins and company to the Orpheum Theatre for a concert featuring the combined forces of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Vancouver Bach Choir, and the Vancouver Bach Children’s Chorus. They will be joined by conductor Markus Huber and soprano Kaitlyn Lusk.

The concert version is a symphonic piece that clocks in at just over two hours, with two movements each dedicated to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. This has been condensed from the score’s full length of 10-and-a-half hours. That’s a lot of music, and Shore admits that when he agreed to take his part in bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic to the screen, he did so without first considering the full scope of the project.

“I was a Tolkien fan, but I hadn’t thought about the actual length of time involved in creating a piece that mirrored Tolkien’s story,” the Toronto-born composer says when the Georgia Straight reaches him in New York, where he now lives. “The work that I did on the score took three years and nine months. So I think when I started, somewhere in the back of my mind I realized the time commitment and the work involved, but it was a rather large, daunting task, so I didn’t think about it in too big a picture. I just followed the footprints of the story very carefully and tried to break things into smaller sections. I worked on very small parts of the story—gestures and small scenes—at first.”

By the time he was finished, Shore had created a score that brought Tolkien’s Middle Earth to life in an aptly grand and sweeping fashion, incorporating musical styles spanning centuries and bridging continents. Each of the saga’s cultures was given its own set of leitmotifs, with the orcs assigned harsh and percussive sounds, the humans accompanied by brass flourishes, and the hobbits presented with lilting Celtic tones. Choirs and soloists sing in Modern and Old English, along with languages of Tolkien’s invention, including Quenya, Adí»naic, and Black Speech.

“I worked carefully with the three screenwriters—Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh, and Peter Jackson,” Shore recalls. “It was a way to tell the story using Tolkien’s languages to add clarity to the story, so you understood the difference between Rivendell and Lothlórien, and between Rohan and Gondor. And by giving the cultures—and certain objects—themes and motifs, it was a way to tell the story clearly. Lord of the Rings is considered one of the most complex fantasy worlds ever created. And in three films you wanted to tell the story to people who might not have read the book, and they had to understand the story and be brought up to speed on the history of Middle Earth and things like that. The music played that role of being a character in the film that kept you abreast of what was unfolding in the story, and who characters were and how they related to each other, and how the cultures related to each other.”

In recent years, Shore has composed music for such wide-ranging cinematic fare as The Aviator, Doubt, and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, but he’s about to find himself immersed in the world of elves, dwarves, and wizards yet again. After years in development hell, Jackson is set to helm a two-part adaptation of The Hobbit, Tolkien’s first published novel.

“The Hobbit is a film we’ve wanted to make for many, many years, and we’ve talked about it going back to 2002, I think,” Shore says. “When we were making The Two Towers, Peter and I talked about making The Hobbit. It’s a story we really love. We’re really happy that it looks like it’s finally getting started in filming. It’s something I’ll be working on over the next three years.”

Sounds as if Shore is quite ready for another adventure.
From the Archives: Father John Misty, Part Two (2015)

April 17, 2020

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.)

Josh Tillman isn’t making things easy. For the first four minutes of his interview with the Georgia Straight, the singer and songwriter also known as Father John Misty declines to give a serious answer to any of the questions being tossed his way. When asked why he relocated from Los Angeles to New Orleans, for example, Tillman drolly claims that he has taken a job with ExxonMobil.

When the Straight attempts a change of tack and queries Tillman about the significance to his career of his recent appearance on the cover of Billboard, he replies with “I wasn’t aware that it was gonna have to mean something when I agreed to it. If that’s the case, then maybe I wouldn’t have done it. But I thought it was just gonna be a big old stupid nothing.”

At this point, your panicked correspondent is feeling beads of flop sweat form on his brow, as he watches his hopes of establishing a rapport with his circumspect subject slowly sink into a quagmire of flippant indifference and hears his carefully wrought questions leave his mouth as a flailing sputter of gibberish.

Tillman then either takes pity on his hapless interrogator or he figures out that he’s dealing with someone who has given more than a merely cursory listen to the latest Father John Misty album, I Love You, Honeybear.

Released in February, that album is Tillman’s attempt at responding in song to the events of the past few years that have shaped him the most, namely falling in love and getting married. His challenge was to do so without resorting to either cheap sentiment or cynicism. Irony, on the other hand, was definitely not off the table.

“I use satire or irony or whatever as a way of resolving certain obsessions that I have,” Tillman says. “With me, a lot of the time contempt turns into obsession very quickly, and the only way for me to resolve that is to render it meaningless by virtue of irony or satire or something. And so I think within the context of my album, there was some contempt-based obsession over the whole enterprise of love songs.”

For someone who professes to hate love songs, Tillman sure can write a beautiful one. Take “I Went to the Store One Day”, which closes Honeybear with a hush of strings and acoustic guitar, atop which the singer implores his new bride, “Don’t let me die in a hospital/I’ll save the big one for the last time we make love.” He follows that with a self-referential line that could be read as a somewhat snarky dismissal of the whole business of writing such a song in the first place. Tillman argues otherwise.

“It’s very sincere for me to include a lyric in a song that’s like, ‘Insert here a sentiment re: our golden years,’ which, yeah, is ironic in a technical sense, but that’s the most sincere thing that I could say, because I was really at a loss for words,” he says. “And this experience that I had in that moment left me at a loss for words, because in that moment, as a writer, I was terrified of marginalizing this experience, or turning it into some kind of schlocky bullshit.”

Schlocky bullshit has never been the man’s stock-in-trade. After recording a bunch of folk-rock albums under the J. Tillman moniker, the singer reinvented himself as Father John Misty for 2012’s Fear Fun. That record was written in the wake of Tillman abandoning his former life—he quit a lucrative gig as Fleet Foxes’ drummer—and driving from Seattle to L.A.

Fear Fun was very much about Tillman’s self-discovery, but it was heavily informed by both mind-expanding drugs and geography, with locales like Laurel Canyon, Hollywood, and Malibu serving as settings for Misty’s psilocybin- and ayahuasca-fuelled misadventures. It was a Day-Glo map of Los Angeles County drawn on blotter paper.

Tillman, who notes that his use of psychedelic drugs still has an impact on his work, says, “I think that part of the reason why psychedelics have long been so taboo in the culture is that the psychedelic experience violently throws into question just about all of the conventions that we’re taught to respect and internalize, whether it’s money or duty or debt or ownership—these ideas that, through that lens, are stripped of whatever value that culture imbues them with.”

And that helps explain one of the other themes that run through I Love You, Honeybear. It’s romantic, sure, but it’s about lovers in a dangerous time, finding solace in each other despite living in a world that is truly, deeply fucked. As Tillman sings, beautifully, on the album’s title track, “My love, you’re the one I want to watch the ship go down with” and “Everything is doomed/And nothing will be spared/But I love you, honeybear.”

Consider also “Holy Shit”, a stream of lyrical imagery that includes “dead religions, holocausts”, “infotainment” and “consumer slaves”, with its narrator weighing the notion that romantic love is “just an economy based on resource scarcity” but accepting that he’s already soaking in it.

Even more pointed is “Bored in the USA”, a ’70s-style piano ballad that pokes at the bloated corpse of the American Dream. In a particularly cutting passage punctuated by canned sitcom laughter, Tillman sings, “Oh, they gave me a useless education/And a subprime loan/On a craftsman home/Keep my prescriptions filled/And now I can’t get off/But I can kind of deal,” before entreating “President Jesus” to save him from his soul-destroying ennui.

“Those songs are sort of like where my work is going,” the tunesmith says. “And I feel very emboldened by the fact that those tunes, and themes that are just starting to crest in those songs, seem to be the things that people are the most interested in, or respond to the most.

“Prior to the psychedelic experiences, my impulse was very much to alienate people with my music, and I think that that was palpable on a subatomic level; I think that anyone who heard it could feel that intention, that the music was engineered to alienate. And for some reason the shedding of certain layers of ego and fear and whatever else through the psychedelic stuff did put me in a position where I was far more apt to write material for the function of communicating and creating commonality.”

Those are ambitious goals, especially when you remember that Tillman is otherwise engaged in the full-time pursuit of draining the Gulf of Mexico of its last remaining drops of petroleum.

In and Out

Josh Tillman sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.

On finding truth via irony: “The nature of truth is a violent contradiction. I think certainty, a lot of the time, is the antithesis of discerning some meaningful truth. That’s the beautiful thing about irony. The function that I think irony serves in my work is that sometimes there’s a question that answers a question better than some kind of grotesquely certain answer could.”

On his inspiration: “I had a whole album’s worth of material prior to the album as it exists today, and it was really shitty because I was asking really shitty questions. Or I’d sort of stopped asking questions or something, and was kind of self-satisfied. I think I kind of got myself into a revelation-themed malaise shortly after the events that predicated the Fear Fun experience. And then I met Emma. And meeting Emma, and following a very nonintellectual impulse to pursue things with her with the intensity that we have, made for far more interesting work.”

On second-guessing himself: “It’s not even album to album, it’s like verse to verse. It’s like, ‘Is this song going to get finished? Is this line going to get finished?’ I can’t even think of it in terms of a life’s work. And then you get halfway through an album and you’re like, ‘I will whore myself out in any way necessary just to make it through this experience without killing myself.’ ”
From the Archives: Father John Misty, Part One (2012)

April 17, 2020

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.)

Josh Tillman is probably already weary of talking about it, but when you pack up your drum kit and quit a band as successful as Fleet Foxes, people are going to ask questions. Tillman did just that, announcing his departure this past January, after a 2011 that had seen the Seattle folk-rock act release its universally acclaimed sophomore album, Helplessness Blues, and garner a Grammy nomination.

When the Straight reaches him on the road in Ohio, Tillman is battling what he calls “a rare bout of intense, earth-shattering nausea”, a consequence of consuming too much alcohol and too little food the night before. Even so, he seems happy to talk, noting that, even though he found being a supporting player in Fleet Foxes unfulfilling, he had a hard time admitting it, even to himself.

“My sense of propriety was telling me that any decent person would be happy in my position, and that since I am unhappy, ergo I’m an ingrate, or some sort of terrible person, for not being able to enjoy that,” Tillman says. “But I had some moment of clarity within the last year, where I just realized that it’s as simple as, ‘The reason you’re not happy is because you’re not doing what you want to do.’ ”

The 31-year-old musician, who had already released seven albums of his own songs under the name J. Tillman, decided to leave the Pacific Northwest altogether. He eventually ended up in Los Angeles, where he currently lives. Along the way, he started writing—not songs, but a novel. That exercise, he says, helped him find his true voice. When he returned to music, he realized he couldn’t just make another J. Tillman record, so he adopted the name Father John Misty, which adorns his latest outing.

The 12-song Fear Fun is, without a doubt, the best work of Tillman’s career to date. Musically, it bounces giddily from the high-in-the-’70s coke-mirror lounge pastiche of “Nancy From Now On” to the rollicking cosmic country-rock of “Tee Pees 1-12” and the dark but tuneful dirge-grunge of “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”. Tillman’s voice is a revelation, sometimes cracking like a shroom-addled street preacher’s, sometimes calling up the ghost of Roy Orbison. The lyrics are sardonic and sometimes hilarious, which makes Fear Fun a very different listening experience than any of Tillman’s studiously earnest earlier work.

“I think for a long time I was really under the impression that nothing valid creatively came out of anything other than fear and trembling—you know, darkness and whatever,” he admits. “I understand why I thought that way at the time, but I don’t see things that way anymore.”

Tillman says his new record represents his emergence from behind the manufactured persona that he cultivated on his previous releases. Although it’s evident that he experienced profound growth as an artist in between abandoning his post with Fleet Foxes and crafting the excellent Fear Fun, Tillman has a pragmatic take on the whole thing.

“I got bored, I blew up my life, and then, lo and behold, I made an album,” he states matter-of-factly. “It’s just really satisfying to have a handle on my own narrative voice, my own creative voice. Ultimately, I’m just excited to be able to continue to use that. Because it doesn’t feel like a dead end in the way that the music I was making previously felt like a dead end, because there was so much fantasy involved in it. There isn’t much fantasy in this music. It’s like, now I know how to talk about myself no matter what stage of life I’m in.”
Follow me on SoundCloud

April 15, 2020

I just created a page on SoundCloud where I will posting tracks I have created at home by myself, some new and some old. These are all things that don’t generally fit into my current musical project, the Starling Effect. But, who knows, they might morph into Starling Effect songs somehow.
From the Archives: Martin Amis, Part Two (2018)

April 15, 2020

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.)

Martin Amis has never been just one sort of writer. He’s arguably most recognized as the masterful novelist behind Money and London Fields, but he’s adept at nonfiction as well. His most recent book, The Rub of Time, is a collection of essays, literary criticism, and reportage published in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere between 1986 and 2017.

In a telephone interview with the Straight, Amis reveals that his next work will be an autobiographical novel. It won’t be a memoir—he has already written one of those, called Experience, which was published in 2000. No, what Amis is working on now falls under the broad umbrella of “life writing”. And it’s not coming easily to him.

“I’ve been trying to write this book for about 15 years,” he explains, speaking from a Toronto hotel room. “It’s mostly about other people, other writers. I’m finding it more and more unsatisfactory, the idea of life writing, and I say so in the course of the novel. There’s quite a lot of lit crit in it, and I found a sort of pretext for the whole project by realizing that, in a way, it’s a novel that combines the essay-writing part of me with the fiction-writing.

“But it’s not fictional enough,” Amis continues. “There’s not enough freedom, because you’re writing about real events, and the subconscious doesn’t seem to have much to do in this project, as it doesn’t have much to do when you’re writing an essay. I’m gonna finish it, and it’s long, so I’m not really expecting it to be very popular or well-received. But I’ve got to get it done, and then I can get on with writing a novel about race in America, which is more exciting to me.”

That, indeed, is a topic that seems to animate the 68-year-old British author. For the past eight or so years, Amis has lived in Brooklyn, and it was with some horror that he witnessed the political ascent of Donald J. Trump (as documented in a pair of biting pieces in The Rub of Time), first to the head of the pack of Republican Party nominees, and then to the White House.

Like anyone possessed of a sense of decency, Amis was appalled by Trump’s courting of the more extreme elements of the American right, including the unapologetic white supremacists he notoriously described as “very fine people”.

“That’s an amazing thing to have done, to do it do so brazenly, to reopen the wound in American history that will never heal,” Amis says. “The central hypocrisy of the whole American idea—you know, committed to the proposition ‘that all men are created equal’, said in 1776, when there were five million Africans under chattel slavery in the South. Absolute hypocritical rubbish. And he [Trump] thought, ‘I’ll prise that wound open, because there is advantage.’ ”

Trump and his ilk are on the wrong side of history, a point Amis makes by invoking some of the more indelible images from the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. Specifically, he cites the example of then-six-year-old New Orleans schoolgirl Ruby Bridges—the first African-American child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in 1960. Photos taken on her first day of school show Bridges, accompanied by four federal marshals, walking bravely past an angry white mob.

“And the side you’re on is of the hate-contorted faces, and not of the dignity of that little girl, the honour of that little girl?” Amis says. “What a shameless thing to do. And that footage of the young men at a lunch counter in a department store—four black men surrounded again by those hideous faces. And that’s the side you’re on. The outrageousness of that has taken a long time to sink in.”

(A relevant aside: in the wake of 9/11 and the 2005 London bombings, Amis found himself branded a racist, or at least an Islamophobe, for his views on Islamist terrorism. Amis took pains to clarify that what he opposed was not Islam itself, but the violence carried out in its name by radicalized fanatics. Answering readers’ queries in the Independent in 2007—included in The Rub of Time as “You Ask the Questions 2”—he wrote “The form that vigilante xenophobia is now taking—the harassment and worse of Muslim women in the street—disgusts me. It is mortifying to be part of a society in which any stratum feels under threat.”)

Amis says of the legacy of racism in the still-divided United States, “I can imagine the black population of America getting over it in about half a century, if all the institutional biases are removed. What I can’t imagine—what I think is inconceivable—is that the white population will ever, can ever, should ever, begin to forgive itself for what it’s done. How do you reconcile yourself with that repetitive cruelty of two-and-a-half centuries of slavery and a hundred years of Jim Crow?”

How indeed. And how does one go about writing a novel that addresses such questions? It would seem to demand a writer who is still in full possession of his powers. The theme of the aging wordsmith, of losing one’s original voice and vision in the face of advancing years, is a thread that connects several of the essays in The Rub of Time. Amis admits that he can already feel his own stamina diminishing slightly, but he won’t let that slow him down or—god forbid—stop him writing altogether.

“It’s your life,” he says. “It’s everything to you, apart from your family. But, you know, Philip Roth has done it. You just say, ‘That’s enough’, and I’m sure it’s because you’re feeling those powers slipping away. It’s very tragic, but I think that’s a dignified response to it rather than toiling on…I find it hard to imagine me doing that—but it’s an option.”
From the Archives: Martin Amis, Part One (2012)

April 15, 2020

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.)

He gave his latest novel, Lionel Asbo, the subtitle State of England, but Martin Amis has been doing a lot of thinking about the state of America. The British novelist has had ample opportunity to closely observe our neighbours to the south, as he now resides in Brooklyn’s historic Cobble Hill neighbourhood. The move to the U.S. was undertaken for personal rather than professional reasons, but Amis has already picked up a bit of freelance work reporting on the American scene. Last month, he covered the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, for the Daily Beast. Not being a U.S. citizen, Amis won’t be voting in November’s general election, but in his Daily Beast piece, he made it pretty clear where his sympathies lie: “We know that Republicans refuse to compromise with Democrats. For how long will they refuse to compromise with reality?”

Reached at the Toronto headquarters of his Canadian publisher, Amis opines that the GOP is the party of choice for those who are suspicious of anyone who dares to display intellectual leanings. “I wrote earlier that if the Democrats represent the American mind and the Republicans represent not the American heart or soul but the American gut, we had two terms of a gut presidency with George W. Bush,” he says. “And everywhere else on Earth, or certainly in the free world, the argument between bowel and brain was settled centuries ago in favour of brain. It’s an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should be not the cleverest but the most average. That’s an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise—except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle. I’ve never had any doubt that you should follow the brain. Of course there are huge populations that don’t feel that way, but in America they don’t really impinge on intellectual life except during elections.”

The two central figures in Amis’s 13th novel, Lionel Asbo—the career criminal of the title and his nephew and ward, Desmond Pepperdine—reside in a fictional corner of the author’s homeland (specifically, a down-at-heel London borough called Diston), but they embody this gut-versus-brain struggle. Born into poverty, the orphan Des sees education as his ticket out of squalor. His uncle, on the other hand, takes great pride in cultivating his own ignorance. Simply put, he’s one bad bastard, whose life is punctuated by spells in prison for offences that aren’t always spelled out. Amis shows us Lionel’s comings and goings from Desmond’s perspective, but we are never shown his acts of violence, only their consequences.

Des himself is hardly without his faults. He’s 15 when the novel opens, and just beginning an incestuous affair with his grandmother Grace, who is, by Diston standards, ancient at the age of 39. That aside, he is easily the most sympathetic figure in a canon populated by rogues and antiheroes, like John Self, the hedonistic protagonist of Money, and Keith Talent, the lecherous abuser in London Fields. “I am amazed that I did create Desmond, because he is by far the most saintly character I’ve ever done,” Amis says. “Admittedly, he’s in trouble when the novel opens, but that’s soon quite a way behind him.”

If Desmond’s back story reads like something out of a Charles Dickens melodrama, that’s no accident. “His example was always present in my mind, because his good characters are failures as works of art, almost without exception,” Amis says of Oliver Twist’s creator. “Well, I suppose you’d say David Copperfield is a believable, mixed sort of character. But all his out-and-out goodies—like Little Nell, Little Dorrit, Esther Summerson—it’s almost a commonplace of criticism that all his energy goes into the villains and none is left for the good characters, who remain faceless and indeed bodiless propositions, and not believable and not sympathetic and not fun to write about or to read about. It is very difficult to do goodness. Henry de Montherlant said happiness and goodness write white—you know, the letters don’t show up. Perhaps Tolstoy’s the only writer who has ever made happiness really a delight to read about. It’s always uphill work to make the goodie the sort of person you want to see on the page. I knew I could do Lionel. I didn’t know I could do Desmond, and I’m quite pleased at how he turned out. Once we’re out of the first quarter of the book, he doesn’t really put a foot wrong, and yet I think he is likable.”

After that first quarter, Lionel’s fortunes shift rather dramatically. An unfathomable £140-million lottery win thrusts him into the spotlight, where he and his newly acquired consort, a Page 3 girl turned poet called “Threnody”, become the objects of that blend of adulation and enmity peculiar to the U.K. tabloid press. The man himself refuses to change, or to learn and grow, for that matter. He would still rather be feared than loved, he still fuels his pit bulls’ rage with Tabasco sauce, and his verbal skills continue to devolve. Throughout the novel, Amis makes a point of noting Asbo’s mangled pronunciations (“pathetic” becomes “puffeh ic-cuh”; his own name becomes “Loyonoo”).

This became a point of contention with some critics, who felt that a child of privilege like Amis (the 63-year-old is the eldest child of the celebrated novelist Kingsley Amis) had no place telling a story rooted in England’s gritty underbelly in the first place. “I did hear, and in fact it became a sort of minor news story, that I shouldn’t write about the working class, or whatever you want to call that strata, and that I didn’t get the language right,” he explains. “Now, the first criticism is too pathetic to answer. It’s so wrong on about a dozen counts, and it’s just a certain kind of mind trying to be self-righteous while at the same time insulting the working class—trying to ghettoize the working class. But as to the accusation that I didn’t get the lingo right: I wasn’t trying to get anything right. I mean, the rhythms are right, I know that. But I was trying to create an idiolect—you know, a way of talking for one individual, not for a class. There probably isn’t anyone who talks like Lionel, but that’s what I wanted. Des said, ‘His verbal prose is going downhill,’ and that’s the direction that Lionel would want it to go.”

Amis doesn’t read reviews of his books. He has a notoriously acrimonious relationship with the press back home, which, as he wrote in The New Republic recently, views literary writers with “emulousness, a kind of cruising belligerence, and an instinctive proprietoriality”.

“I went back there earlier in the summer, to England, naively hoping that it was all going to be different,” he says, “and it wasn’t one bit different, and I suspect it will always be that way. I don’t know. I can’t account for it. But writers in general are resented more in Britain.”

All the more reason, then, for Amis to keep a close watch on the state of America.
From the Archives: Strand of Oaks, Part Two (2019)

April 12, 2020

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.”
From the Archives: Strand of Oaks, Part One (2014)

April 10, 2020

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.)

When the Straight catches up with Timothy Showalter, the Strand of Oaks frontman is at a tour stop in Bloomington, Indiana. Not the most glamorous locale, perhaps, but being there is a big deal for the Philadelphia-based musician, because it’s a return to his old stomping grounds.

“It’s a big nostalgia trip, because both of my brothers went to college here,” he says. “I probably got drunk here way too young many, many times, and have some good memories of this place, so it’s nice to be back in the Midwest.”

Strand of Oaks’ next stop, just three hours upstate from Bloomington, is Goshen, which happens to be Showalter’s hometown as well as the setting of the song that opens his latest album, HEAL. “Goshen ’97” roars to life with some typically blistering lead guitar courtesy of Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis. The lyrics paint a portrait of the now 32-year-old Showalter at the start of his musical life—finding his dad’s old tape machine, buying cheap Casio keyboards, and singing Smashing Pumpkins songs to his bedroom mirror. It’s a wistful reminiscence, but the chorus refrain of “I don’t want to start all over again” makes it clear that, were Showalter given the chance to be that socially challenged 15-year-old once more, he’d pass, thank you very much.

“I think that’s a healthy form of nostalgia, because anything, in the haze of memory, can become nice,” he says. “And I realized it was a really bad time, but also a good time. But more importantly, I just want to have that in the past, you know, and wear those awkward teenage years like a badge of courage: I did it, I survived it, it didn’t get me, so let’s just keep it there.

“For me to have that song first on the record also felt like a Reset button was hit,” he continues. “My whole career, I’d made a different kind of music, and I wanted to just come out of the gates running. I wanted to be bold, I wanted to start with this. If that song was Track 5, it wouldn’t work like it does on Track 1. It needed to be the first thing people hear.”

Indeed, “Goshen ’97” is unlike anything found on any of the previous three Strand of Oaks albums, which were more in line with the subtly shaded folk-rock of Iron and Wine or William Fitzsimmons. (Showalter, it must be said, possesses a wizard-king beard to rival both.) Speaking in terms any Bruce Springsteen fan will understand, Showalter states that he is now well past his Nebraska phase. With its mix of guitar-led rockers (“Shut In” and “For Me”) and dancing-in-the-dark synth-pop tunes (“Same Emotions” and the title track), HEAL seems to have more in common with the commercial juggernaut with which the Boss followed up Nebraska. Showalter says that the notion hadn’t occurred to him, but he doesn’t disagree.

“I love Born in the U.S.A., because some of those are just heart-wrenching lyrics,” he enthuses. “Even on the song ‘Born in the U.S.A.’—they’re some of the saddest lyrics I’ve ever heard, yet there’s this anthemic music mixed with really touching, sincere, earnest lyrics. But it can be played in a stadium. That’s kind of what I wanted with this. I wanted to be singing about really strong, real emotions, but I didn’t want it to sound like an Elliott Smith record, you know? I wanted it to be bold. Anthemic is much more powerful, I think, than introspective, especially for this record.”

The strong emotions to which Showalter refers are tied largely to the same sort of unsentimental looking-back that gave rise to “Goshen ’97”. Although the title pertains to actual physical healing—during the mixing phase, Showalter was recovering from injuries sustained in a head-on collision with a semi that he and his wife were lucky to walk away from—it goes deeper than that, and further into the past. The singer has, to coin a phrase, seen some shit. More than a decade ago he went through a particularly traumatic breakup after his then fiancée had an affair while Strand of Oaks was on tour. A few months after that, Showalter lost his house to a fire.

These are things his previous efforts have touched upon, but his songwriting has never been as specific as it is on HEAL; he goes so far as to name the woman who betrayed him. “It’s practically a diary entry,” Showalter admits. “It’s almost uncomfortably honest at times. I didn’t intend for it to be that way, but I just wanted to go there. I didn’t want to hide behind metaphors anymore.”

Above and beyond the lyrical catharsis, however, the performer seems to be most thrilled about being able to walk out on-stage every night, crank the volume knob on his amp, and rock the fuck out.

“I love playing loud music,” he asserts. “It’s been such a liberating experience, too, to be able to turn guitars up, something as simple as that, and play music loud. The new album has lyrics that you can really attach to, but I think I’m most excited that there’s a visceral element to it. It’s physical now. You can react to it on many different levels. You can drink a bottle of beer and head-bang to it, or you can think about painful experiences in your life that I might be singing about that are similar. And I frankly don’t care which way people take it. If they just want to turn it up loud and have fun with it, then more power to them.”

In & Out: Timothy Showalter sounds off on the things enquiring minds want to know.

On getting J Mascis to play on “Goshen ’97”: “It was an incredibly easy process, because we’re on sister labels. He’s on Jagjaguwar and I’m on Dead Oceans. I turned in an early demo of the song, and I had my own face-melter shred part. And then someone at the label was like, ‘Oh, man, it would sound cool if J Mascis played on this.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it’d be cool if Jimmy Page played on it too, but things like that can’t happen.’ And then 24 hours later, we had him on the track. We sent him the track, he shredded face, and then it just happened.”

On the support of his wife, Sue: “She should have gotten the producer credit for this. Not only is it difficult songs about our personal life, but she was just there, hearing hundreds of demos, mostly in bad forms. I would wake her up in the middle of the night and be like, ‘I put a new guitar part down!’ And she’d be like, ‘I heard this song 20 times already today, Tim. We’re good. Can I just hear the record when it’s finished?’ ”

On his lyrical references to other musicians: “It’s paying tribute. This record is about relationships, but it’s mostly about my relationship to music—what it’s done to my life and how much it’s helped me. At the initial starting point of wherever my head was at to get this record going, I had Sharon Van Etten on my headphones. And I was like, ‘Why wouldn’t I say that?’ Of course I should say that, because she helped me. Songs do that. Smashing Pumpkins did that when I was 15, and Jason Molina did that for most of my life.”
Beyond the Hollow Tree

April 1, 2020

I created a section of this site to highlight my unpublished middle-grade fantasy novel. Please take a look and pass the link around freely. I haven’t had any luck at all getting agents to read this thing I spent three years writing, and I could use a little help.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Pexels.com
Got freelance?

March 25, 2020

Today I learned that my hours, and therefore my income, will be reduced significantly, effective immediately. This is, as you might expect, fallout from the current pandemic. While I count myself lucky that I did not get laid off (as several of my colleagues did), the reduced income will hurt. So I am reaching out to my network. I know these are hard times for everyone and that business is generally bad, but I could really use some freelance work, now more than ever.

I am a damn good writer and editor, on both the journalistic side of things and the PR/marketing side. I’m pretty good at social media and SEO, and I have faked my way through a few Google ad campaigns in my time. (I also play guitar and some people seem to enjoy that.)

To learn more about me and what I can do for you or your business, please see my LinkedIn page.

So, that’s my spiel. Any and all offers seriously considered. Thanks, everyone. (Please share this post.)