Eraserland is already a totemic record to me, the kind I carry in the chambers of my heart so it can flow through me again and again. Released on March 29th – my mother’s birthday – my most recent Spotify count is 49 for the album (minimum play), with the singles near 100 each. Somewhere between 3 to 4 listens a day, in the neighborhood of three and a half hours a day.  That’s nearly every non-work hour I’m awake. These songs, however new, already possess a comfortable familiarity to me.

Carl Broemel called him to ask if My Morning Jacket could back him for a record. Tim, mired in a painfully deep depression and mind in the undertow of Hard Love’s reception, agreed, but had a problem: he had no songs. He wrote the songs because he had to, learning eventually that he wanted to, needed to vent them and the related thoughts and feelings. Tim wrote these songs in the wintry, desolate beauty of Wildwood, NJ, lonely and alone, nights long.  He walked the beaches under this cloud and in winter’s embrace, carrying his favorite records in his mind, his ears, like Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, which he writes about on his Instagram account in the wake of Mark Hollis’s death.      

So, though mired deeper in the bogs of depression than ever before, he learned how to breathe through the muck, eventually waded, trudged, and let the ocean’s crash wash it away.  A few weeks, some recordings, and then a few more weeks with My Morning Jacket (sans Jim) in Louisville, and then Eraserland. It’s an honest record, in the truest sense.  It deals in depression, hopelessness, but also in the power of buoyancy and good love and the magic of music and friendship.   

Sonically, it’s vintage Strand of Oaks, fusing heartland rock and postpunk and psychedelia, all with the flourishes the members of My Morning Jacket can (and do) provide. MMJ became close friends with Tim back when they toured together; Tim interviewed Carl after Carl released his new record last year, and Carl pushed Tim to make this record. That kind of closeness has a pervasive effect, their relationship informing the music – they know how to move with one another, to know when to push or tighten something, when to give space, when to add or subtract. That implicit knowledge and the skill to use it defines great bands and great production.

So Tim strutted into DC at U Street Music Hall, walking onto the stage after Tyler Ramsey’s beautiful opening set (he’s coming to First Thursday in June – get ready), hitting the stage smiling, a feral and joyful glint in his eye. Not MMJ in tow for the tour, but a few guys who had apparently only played together five times before – though I wouldn’t have guessed it – all of them feeding off the vigor of their frontman, their talisman at the mic.

Tim bookended the set with the same first and last track off Eraserland, a kind of perfect nod to the album’s structure, the importance of its order.  The opening line, “I don’t feel it anymore” and the final line, “I hope it never ends” illustrate the push and pull, the ebb and flow of the emotions and the timbre of these songs.  The shift from that sense of hopelessness that hides behind the beautiful groove of “Weird Ways” to the endless hope of “Forever Chords”.  This is what you – as a reader, a current fan, a future fan – need to understand about Strand of Oaks.  Tim Showalter knows what it’s like to feel heavy weights strung from your shoulders and he’s learned what it’s like to let go of the weight or accept help carrying it.

“Weird Ways” possesses a unique magic, the way it rolls out the themes and the band. It begins with Tim strumming his guitar while singing the aforementioned and lonely opening line, and then the band progressively joining the song and almost hugging Tim with their music, their instruments. It has an enveloping and euphoric effect, a sonic reminder that we are not as alone as we think we are, that others can lift us up and it’s okay to let them. Seeing it live, as the instruments explode off the stage and reverberate around the club, as the people behind and around me dance and sing along, Tim leans into the song. They rolled right into “Radio Kids” off Hard Love, its rejoinder to social media, its call to actually listening to the songs we hear instead of clicking next again and again.

They played “Keys”, a true and heavy love song for his wife Sue, replete with the kinds of short stories that define a relationship, a life – about dreams we have that will never exactly come to pass, but as long as you have your love, it’s kind of okay. It’s kind of not, too, and the moment sings that last chorus, you can almost hear Tim struggle through his emotions, “I’ll buy a trailer down in the Keys / I’ll be that bartender with boring stories / And I gotta, gotta get my shit together before / I’m 40.” It’s a hard, beautiful kind of love song, and I found myself looking back at my wife in the crowd instead of taking a last few photos before I left the pit. We’ve had those talks before and we’ve known those thoughts. 

Cheeks red, smiling, he tells us his tattoo artist (Josh Stephens) is in the crowd, referencing the line in “Keys” – “Got my tattoos, lost my band / my favorite one is on my hand” – laughingly telling us Josh did not do this tattoo, and then clarified it’s his favorite tattoo, but not his best tattoo. 

After rippling through “Passing Out”, my personal favorite from the Hard Love era of tunes (though it’s actually from Harder Love), he looked out at us with a wide, cheesy smile while saying, “I’ve got the blues. The Hyperspace blues!” as the band kicked into hyperdrive and tore through time and space. It’s the kind of song that actually feels like motion, as though we are all genuinely moving from one place to another, as a group, on a journey, grooving together. The band carried that motion forward, exploding into and through the equally massive “Moon’s Landing,” an exorcism song, an emptying of the mind. I have a strong suspicion that this one will some day get its own essay. It deserves it. 

They played “Ruby” next, the happiest, catchiest, and almost savagely effervescent Strand of Oaks song I’ve ever heard, filling it with beautiful solos, and the moment when the tone of the song shifts, slows down, and Tim damn near caresses the crowd with his voice, “Ruby, won’t you slow it down? It’s happening so fast / Ruby, won’t you pull be back? I’m living in the past” again and again, building and building, exploding, and then a little outro, all followed by the cathartic and soul-restoring pain and exultation of “JM”, his ode to Jason Molina from HEAL. 

Somewhere around this time, he told the story of how his career has been building to a Christmas record, all of his songs of existential dread giving way to jingling bells and his youthful Santa visage. He laughed about becoming a young Santa, a Jesus Santa, or as he eventually yelled in a moment of revelation, Christ Santa, before riding onward into the champagne uncorking, orgiastic “Final Fires”. 

The show felt fast, paced as quickly as possible, maybe because there’s an urgency to Tim’s music, but also maybe because the band had a hard curfew of 9:50 so U Street could get ready to host a disco party. He looked around at his band, said something inaudibly, and then asked the crowd if we wanted a few more shorter songs or one long song. We voted for a long song, a few of us shouting for “Forever Chords.” He smiled and said, “Good, that’s the one you’re getting.”

A few weeks ago, Tim shared artwork he’d made for the song (now on a t-shirt, one of which I own) and asked his fans to record themselves playing the song or reading the song or doing whatever they wanted with it, but sharing it back with him. I remember printing out the lyrics and just reading the words into my phone while at the park, the endless hope crushing the endless ennui. A kind of call to action. 

In person, “Forever Chords” is more than just a great song. It’s a fucking benediction, as close to faith as I’ve ever felt. As Tim leaned back, as he reached his hand into the air, arm screaming, “SURVIVE”, guitar wailing with wild abandon singing, 

and forever chords 

you learned as a kid 

that endless hope 

of all that lies ahead 

could never get old 

stop living in your head 

chase the moments of bliss 

they’ll outshine the bad 

if you believe you can be loved 

you’ll outlive your past 

and you hope it never ends 

you hope it never ends 

I hope it never ends 

I hope it never ends

And God, I really hope it never ends.

Make sure you catch him on tour. If you missed the DC show, you can make the trek to Philly’s Union Transfer on 5.10.19 (a homecoming show for him) or wait until he comes to Baltimore in September.

All photos courtesy and copyright of Matt Ruppert