Weekly Neil: Grandpa's Interview, With Strand Of Oaks
A chat with Timothy Showalter about how Neil built the infrastructure of his career and the synth-heavy new Strand Of Oaks album 'Miracle Focus'
This is Weekly Neil, a newsletter about Neil Young. This week, I’m pleased to feature a conversation with Timothy Showalter, better known as Strand Of Oaks, an artist who used to describe his music as “Neil Young trying to write a Pink Floyd record.” He also has a terrific song called “Forever Chords” that he referred to as “a thank you note” to Neil. If it’s not clear, he’s a huge Neil head — but as he clarifies in our chat, he realized not long ago that he should probably branch out and explore some other stuff. And explore he has: His new album, Miracle Focus, is a self-described “healthy mix of Ram Dass, yoga, Freddie Mercury, Alice Coltrane, and Beastie Boys.” But Neil, as ever, is still there (if you look hard enough). As a side note, another great themed interview would tackle Tim’s enduring love for Smashing Pumpkins. (He name-drops them in “Goshen ‘97” and has fan-casted an alt Siamese Dream tracklist where “Starla” replaces “Silverfuck.”) But Tim reveres Neil to the point where he said Neil built the entire infrastructure of his own career, and not just in the way that he’s a long-haired dude who likes to shred occasionally. He really lives the fandom.
The first time I heard Tim Showalter play live, it bordered on a religious experience. It wasn’t this performance of “Kill Dragon,” but it sounded just like it (and took place only a few months later). I was 20 and struggling with my own Catholic identity and feelings of creeping agnosticism. Hearing Tim sing, “Mary, Mary, Mary, would you marry me? And you and me and Jesus could be a family,” brought in a supernatural sense of yearning — if I couldn’t have the kind of subjugated relationship with God the church expected, maybe something like familial love might work. It sounds so dramatic, but it’s true. Strand Of Oaks in an old church basement in Buffalo helped me realize there are many different types of love, and as insane as it sounds, he helped me grasp that all love is good and should be aimed for.
Tim’s voice is so lovely, soft and full of perforations where light leaks out. Without it, and the cathedral effect he’d somehow wrangled out of his guitar, I likely wouldn’t have had such a reaction. “Emotional” is kind of Tim’s hallmark as Strand Of Oaks, though much like we’ve both grown a lot personally since that show in 2011, the Strand Of Oaks listening experience has likewise expanded to contain multitudes of emotionality. On his 2014 breakthrough HEAL, the draw was opulent synths and pure confessional bloodletting; he’s since followed it up with some cool trips (“Taking Acid And Talking To My Brother”) and even a fantastical ode to his deceased cat (“Jimi & Stan”).
But his new album Miracle Focus might be his sharpest left turn yet, full of siren synths and a healthy dose of Pure Moods ambiance. For the ‘80s Neil diehards, there’s even some “Computer Age” overlap in his vocoder use. Tim’s a little bit older than Neil was when he did Trans, and his past work had plenty of Ditch moments (especially HEAL), which means the way he’s aged into a new version of himself recalls one of the greatest gifts Neil continues to give — that permission to stay true to yourself even as what’s marketable, economical, or “cool” will wax and wane around you.
“I am most likely going to isolate whatever remaining fan base I have with Miracle Focus,” Tim said during our call. “I think for the people that are ready for it and ready to take the time to listen it, it could be their favorite record ever. But as far as the people who are hoping for a ‘Forever Chords’ this time around, it's not going to be there.”
Below, we get into exactly why that’s perfect for Tim and how his very own Harvest Moon — whatever that sounds like — could be just around the corner.
Photo by Greg Vrotsos
Weekly Neil: The list of inspirations for Miracle Focus has Alice Coltrane, meditation, your own painting — I feel like all is of a piece. Then there's Freddie Mercury and Beastie Boys. So how do those fit into the patchwork?
Tim Showalter: Alice Coltrane and a lot of the more spiritual-minded stuff was kind of the patron saints, just the absolute ethos of it imprinted on the record. But stylistically, Beastie Boys and Queen and Freddie Mercury are the main — the kind of unlocking moment that happened is my best friend and co-producer Kevin [Ratterman] and I were just up late one night a few years ago, and we just randomly put on the song “[Who Wants To] Live Forever” by Queen. It's so easy to take a band that ubiquitous and kind of write them off of, like, “Yeah, that's just Queen.” But we just heard the song, like, this is one of the greatest testaments to music I've ever heard. If you put on Queen records, especially from the ‘80s, and then put on Miracle Forus, the secrets are thus revealed with what we were shooting for.
Beastie Boys are just — there's a joy that I always got since I was a kid. I don't remember not having Beastie Boys in my ears. I'm 40 years old, and this music, it's not even a throwback. I just can listen to it with a new approach and kind of take out the legend and just listen to it as it is. I've done something similar with George Michael recently. I had no idea that he also wrote and produced the Wham! songs at 19. I was like, oh, wow, of course this is the most popular artist in the world. It was a nice kind of a reawakening, especially this being Uncle Neil that we're discussing today. Neil Young imprinted so deeply in my DNA that it was almost good to give Neil a break for a while because he's given me so much. I feel like I drank from the Neil well for so long that it's almost like I put blinders on of the immensity of music that can come into songwriting.
WN: It’s interesting because there’s not a lot of Neil I hear when I listen to Miracle Focus, but I hear him a lot in other Strand Of Oaks songs.
Tim: If anything, what Neil will always provide me is just not necessarily the what the music sounds like. It's his approach to it. He channels whatever he is feeling, career be damned. Expectations be damned. I mean, Geffen sued him for not sounding like Neil Young. The ethos of those moves that he made, which, you know, from a music biz perspective, was near suicidal, but from his heart and his soul it was pure. The only other example would be Springsteen doing Nebraska, which is always a guiding light for me. Unfortunately, and I might have inherited this from Uncle Neil, even if every sign is pointing me for me to do something that might further and better my career, I just can't. I can't do it again. People really seem to like it when I thrashed away on Replacements-sounding music. I just couldn't. My fingers wouldn't allow me to do that again. They might at some point.
I've been doing a few of these talks about Miracle Focus, and people keep saying, “Were you intentionally trying to make this giant shift?” There was no motivation. I just felt like doing it, like Neil bought the Fairlight synth: “I'm really into this, and I'm really into Lionel trains.” I don't know why. It's just where my heart is leading me. Uncle Neil is actually incredibly apropos for this record because I really admire bands that can kind of dig in and be like, “This is what we're going to sound like for the next 35 records.” My bank account may appreciate that more, and in ticket counts, it shows. But there's just something that I was drawn to about looking at the idea of a catalog, and if an artist has a catalog, I love it when it's just, like, “I have no idea what's coming next.”
WN: You’ve mentioned Neil in relation to your song “Forever Chords.” Even just the title, I’m like, man, what a cool way of thinking about why a song like “Cortez The Killer” or “Down By The River” works. There are these two or three chords, and you can just play them forever.
Tim: Recently, I've discovered mantras and I've discovered the beauty and the life-changing experience of repetition and having this vibrating energy moving through you in such a healing way. It's a very short distance between a mantra and “Cortez The Killer.” They're very similar. I love complicated music as well. Keith Jarrett is probably my current favorite. It's what I listen to most now, and that is sometimes the most complex music I've ever heard. But then again, when it comes to how I approach music, sometimes when we'll play “Forever Chords,” it could be 25 minutes, and it's essentially C to E minor, but by the end of it, I I feel different. I feel like, as a performer, I go through a whole experience of living.
Sometimes Neil gets slightly more complex, but probably one of the reasons why I relate to him is we don't have, like, Frank Zappa chops. We're not writing Stravinsky meets rock music. There's many times I wish I had the chord language of a Wes Montgomery or a jazz artist, but I just I don't have that in my knowledge base. So the tools you have to work with, it's like — I moved into my house a few years ago in Austin, and we didn't have a table, and I was like, I want to build a table. I don't know how to build a table, but I had like, three tools, and I went and bought wood and I built a table with that. It's not a perfect table, but it's my table, and I feel like that's exactly how I make music. With the influence of people like Neil Young, it's like, the tools you're given: What can you do with these tools?
WN: Just last night, I was hearing Yo-Yo Ma on Fresh Air basically saying this exact same thing. Anyway, it can obviously be impossible to pick a favorite Neil era or album. You’ve covered “Cortez,” you’ve mentioned Greendale before. Is there one that speaks to you that you come back to again and again from his catalog?
Tim: I say this in an extremely positive way: I feel like On The Beach held me hostage for about 15 years. It was just my everything. I almost got to this point where, and this is all to honor the music and not to deter from it, but I actually got to this point, funnily enough, a few years ago, where I just had to say, with the time I have remaining, I need to branch out. I need to learn about classical music, because I have given so much of my listening life — from 13 years old, when I got a tape of Neil Young Unplugged from my library, until I was, you know, maybe just a few years back, I just had this moment in my life with my own identity and and how much I devoted to a certain version of myself that I felt like the infrastructure on a bridge, and that infrastructure was, like, 25-30 years old, and it was starting to crumble. I was like, I need to build a new architecture of who I am, if anything, to expand my life.
It sounds crazy, but I do feel like when it comes to like certain types of jazz and other types of music, I feel like I earned my membership through work and through years of devoting myself to listening to music. I listened to like a Pharoah Sanders record, and I was like, yeah, oh, I understand. I can't play this language, but now I can translate it to my own heart. But the problem is, when that door opens, you are just then confronted with millions of hours of music to discover. But man, I mean, if “Ambulance Blues” comes on, I'm gonna be a total wreck.
It's similar to Jason Molina's music. I think I actually disappoint people when I tell them like I don't really listen to his music, because it's so much in me now. I don't necessarily know if I need to put the needle on the record and listen to it much.
WN: You strike me as the kind of person who, you know, you're building tables, getting into painting, obviously acting, too. There's all this stuff that, if you feel slightly led in one direction and you want to pursue it, and you’ll follow and give it your all. That’s a very Neil operating procedure.
Tim: It's a wild time to be changing something like that as as a 41-year-old. But also, I put out a record called Pope Killdragon, you know? When Pope John Paul II died, I was like, I'm gonna write about John Belushi dying of a heroin overdose and the Pope. No idea. I'll be honest with you. When I wrote my last record, In Heaven, I was like, I want to try to see if I can write what I look like should be writing. It was almost a conceptual experiment to be like, “I'm going to play the acoustic guitar,” but in my own head, those songs turned out to be my cat hanging out with Jimi Hendrix in heaven. The truck never came into being, the hanging out by the lake — actually, I have a song about the lake now, but, you know, even when I concentrate and I try, like, “This is going to be the one” — let's just say I wouldn't make it in Nashville.
Ever since I was a kid, too. I made an entire series as a kid, probably 50 or 60 different comics about this made-up band called The Nuclear Warheads. I just had this entire ethos built, and it was as real to me as anything. Something wired in my brain. And I have the most normal parents you've ever seen! The nicest, most normal, Indiana, wonderful people that don't have a lot of psychedelic tendencies. But from the earliest age, I was just it just wired that way.
WN: It’s such a pleasure to talk with you, Tim, because the energy you’re putting out now, I can tell it’s 100% real. I feel like I could run through a brick wall right now. I feel very creatively inspired to keep it going now.
Tim: Well, Patrick, I also feel inspired. For the first time maybe in a few years, I might dust off some Uncle Neil this afternoon.
WN: What would you reach for?
Tim: I’ve been hankering to hear that song “Grandpa’s Interview” off of Greendale for a long time. I think it’s such a low-key classic. I feel bad: I don’t think people gave that record enough love. It’s a really neat statement that he did, especially that late in his career. I might do a little Greendale listen today. It’s classic Neil, but he’s going for something. He’s definitely going for something on that.
Strand Of Oaks’ new album Miracle Focus is out this Friday, June 7. Pre-order it here.
“Grandpa’s Interview,” written by Neil Young, from Greendale (2003)
Neil Young: vocals, guitar
Billy Talbot: bass, vocals
Ralph Molina: drums, vocals