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Strand of Oaks issues a loud, rocking command: 'HEAL'

The fourth album Philadelphia songwriter Timothy Showalter has recorded under the name Strand of Oaks arrives with its title in all capital letters.

Timothy Showalter, performing as Strand of Oaks, has a fourth album marked by a musical turn from acoustic: "I'm saying this powerful stuff, and it's not going to be said with an acoustic guitar."
Timothy Showalter, performing as Strand of Oaks, has a fourth album marked by a musical turn from acoustic: "I'm saying this powerful stuff, and it's not going to be said with an acoustic guitar."Read moreCHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer

The fourth album Philadelphia songwriter Timothy Showalter has recorded under the name Strand of Oaks arrives with its title in all capital letters.

It's called HEAL.

"It's not like 'It'll be better,' " Showalter says, his voice dropping to a whisper, then rising to a shout. "It's like, 'It'll be . . . BETTER. You better believe it's going to be better!' It's slapping yourself in the face to make sure you're held accountable to the idea that you are going to heal."

Showalter's three previous Strand of Oaks albums - Leave Ruin (2009), Pope Killdragon (2010), and Dark Shores (2012) - were self-released and largely acoustic.

HEAL ( nolead begins ***1/2 nolead ends ), comes out Tuesday on Dead Oceans, part of the Secretly family of labels. Based in Showalter's native Indiana, Secretly has also been home to such heroes of his as the late Jason Molina and Dinosaur Jr. The guitar of Dinosaur Jr. shredder J Mascis shows up on HEAL's lead track, "Goshen '97."

Strand of Oaks plays a Free at Noon show at World Cafe Live on Friday, then begins a U.S. tour in August with a full band. The tour comes to the Boot & Saddle on Sept. 19.

The music on HEAL is more rocked-out than any Showalter has recorded. "It poured out just like the lyrics," he says. "It was like, 'I'm saying this powerful stuff, and it's not going to be said with an acoustic guitar. I don't want this to be heard in the back of a coffee shop.' We wanted this record to be as loud as possible."

Showalter, 32, is sitting in the courtyard in back of a coffee shop on Germantown Avenue in Mount Airy. He's around the corner from where he lives with his wife, Sue, whose hand rests on his shoulder on the cover of HEAL.

With shoulder-length hair and a beard ("I always wanted to look like Lemmy [Kilmister], 'cause I loved Motörhead"), Showalter has arms covered in impressive tattoos, one of which says SURVIVE.

It might be an intimidating tough-guy look were it not for the sweetness in Showalter's eyes, or the wall drawing of Sylvester the Cat that looks over his left shoulder.

HEAL announces its intentions with "Goshen '97." The song takes Showalter back to the basement of his parents' house, where he was a 15-year-old Hoosier staring at a Joy Division poster. It celebrates music as the key that unlocks teenage identity. "I found my dad's old tape machine," Showalter exults, over driving guitars. "That's where the magic began."

"There's something about that discovery," he says. "Because you can almost wear that loneliness as a badge of honor. Like, 'I'm not fitting in with the other kids!' . . . Music really did save a kid that was going to be weird already."

The middle son of a car salesman and a secretary/schoolteacher, Showalter left northern Indiana when he was 20. A visit to a friend's house in Wilkes-Barre turned into six years in the Lehigh Valley, balancing work as a bus driver and second-grade teacher with his musical ambitions. In 2009 he moved to Mount Airy, got married, and dedicated himself to music full-time.

Showalter now sees both Pope Killdragon and Dark Shores as conceptual albums in which he employed fantastical conceits to flee his demons. Dark Shores is "the saddest record I'll ever write, I hope. I was so afraid of writing about what my reality is that I had to mask it in weird metaphors. I love those songs. But if I'm talking about an impending divorce and I have to talk about it through the guise of an astronaut farmer, there's something wrong."

Phil Waldorf, the record executive who signed Showalter, first became aware of Strand of Oaks when the song "Spacestations" was released as part of Fishtown producer Brian McTear's Shaking Through Web series for Weathervane Music.

Waldorf wasn't completely sold until he saw Showalter perform as Strand of Oaks with drummer Chris Ward (of Philly's Pattern Is Movement), opening in large rooms for acts like the Tallest Man on Earth and Phosphorescent.

"They were this compact duo, with a lot of beard," Waldorf says. "I could see the band getting better and better. This is what happens when talented people go out on the road."

He wrote HEAL in a burst of therapeutic creativity last fall. More than 40 autobiographical songs poured out. Cut first as demos in his Port Richmond studio, they were finished in Akron, Ohio, with producer Ben Vehorn. Showalter played all the instruments except drums.

"I think he really wanted to break out of the mold of being a singer-songwriter," Waldorf says. "He wanted more. He took aggressive steps. There were chances taken. I remember hearing these songs and going, 'Holy [expletive]!' People are going to love them, and he's going to have to open up and talk about some really dark places he's been."

Showalter's marriage was in turmoil, he says. "I thought it was going to be this divorce record, this very sad marital-problems record."

Indeed, HEAL is a breakup record, in a way: "I broke up with myself. I broke up with something in my subconscious. There was so much pain and so many problems that forced their way to the surface."

During the recording process, he got the SURVIVE tattoo. "I had problems with cutting," he says. "Bad issues with that. I'd get drunk and get sad. I decided, 'I don't want to do that, and if I have a nice tattoo there' . . . . "

HEAL songs like "Woke Up to the Light" and "Wait for Love," which Showalter sings in a soaring falsetto, fit together as parts of a cohesive whole. So does the Neil Young-ish "JM." It's addressed to Molina, the singer for bands such as Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Company who died in Indianapolis last year at 39.

"Getting older every day, still making the same mistakes," Showalter sings, accompanied by the comfort of having "your sweet songs to play."

"I wouldn't write songs the way I do if it wasn't for Jason," Showalter says. "I heard him when I was about 18 and it just changed my life. I loved heavy music, but this was something that felt like a heavy-metal record but with an acoustic guitar.

"People say it's such sad music," Showalter goes on, a remark that might be made about his own. "But he was never hopeless. . . . It was always the opposite." Thus the final words of "JM" are "Either get out or stay in, I won't let those dark times win."

"That's a choice I had to make in my own life," Showalter says. "He and I have that in common: We both meet the darkness with our fists clenched. It's like: 'I'm not going to let you take me down!' "