“My mind was basically just looking for antennas or beacons to lead me towards fascination and inspiration.”
That’s what Tim Showalter of indie rock project Strand of Oaks told me about the culmination of the “flow state”-founded songs from his latest (and eighth) record, Miracle Focus. “It came from painters,” Showalter expounded “It came from watching old skateboard videos I loved as a kid and all these things that just brought me joy and brought me a connected feeling to the greater whole, and they all amalgamated themselves into a synth-opera that I wasn't expecting.”
Indeed, for fans of the Indiana-born, now Austin-based Strand of Oaks, hearing the songs of Miracle Focus will not be what’s expected. But a true fan will get in there with Showalter and allow him to guide and reward as the best storytellers can.
This new album — like many recent albums — sprung forth from an unexpected grappling with pandemic life (and also mid-life) and finds Showalter clean, clear-minded and expanding his creative horizons. At the time, he had recently become not only a painter, but a television actor, tapping into personal sources of innate joy and peace to level up his main vocation as a musician, his calling for a couple decades.
Everyone from Alice Coltrane to Freddie Mercury, yoga, the Beastie Boys and Ram Dass all went into the making of this atmospheric album that’s equally about finding yourself as it is letting go. It sees Showalter experimenting with synth layering and mantra-like lyrics to “inspire bliss,” as he said.
Showalter and I spoke ahead of his appearance at Milwaukee’s Cactus Club – a club near and dear to his heart, where he’s eagerly anticipating a nostalgic return and hoping to find friendly faces to help him continue leveling up on his chosen path as an artist.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
It's been a while, my friend. Welcome.
Good to talk to you again, Erin.
We were talking about this a little bit before we went on the record. As a native Midwesterner — Indiana, to be exact — what's it like living in Austin, which is supposed to be one of the main music capitals of the U.S.? Was it an easy transition? Do you miss the seasons? Do you miss the Midwestern vibes?
Austin represents a lot of great things in my life and my wife's life. My wife got a great job down here and, like most musicians, you should probably follow where your partner gets the job, and I have always been fascinated by Austin just from years of playing.
The first time I came down here, like 20 years ago, in the back of my head there was something saying I should live here someday. It feels like I'm on vacation every day. I grew up in northern Indiana, like the other side of the lake from you guys, and had those winters. And there is something in me that I do not miss cold. I feel like my body is activated by heat. I wasn't sure how I was going to handle it.
My wife's from Pennsylvania, and I knew that we were getting acclimated down here because we were going to go for a walk, and my wife was like, “I should put on a sweater,” and it was about 86 degrees out.
So I think we've kind of officially become acclimated, but you know, I do miss the seasons. That Midwest feeling of the joy that May brings after a long winter or the fall. The greenness I do miss completely, but I've moved a lot in my life now, and I now forget certain things. ‘Cause I grew up in Indiana, moved to Philadelphia when I was 18, now Austin, and who knows what's next? The moon, maybe? We'll see [laughs].
That's like our next destination in general as humans, right?
Exactly. Yeah. Play a concert on the moon.
You're coming to Milwaukee's Cactus Club on July 21. You're touring on this new album called Miracle Focus, which just came out on Western Vinyl Records. And then your show in Milwaukee, it seems like it's like the final one on the leg of your tour. I want to talk a little bit about your deep history with Milwaukee, particularly with one band. I know you know who I'm talking about. Can you give a synopsis on how you came to initially meet and then tour with former Milwaukee band Juniper Tar?
Oh, well, that is a long time ago. My years have been kind of skewed, so I can't remember if it was 10 years ago, but I met the Juniper Tar guys and just became fast friends. It felt like there's such a commonality culturally — just where we're all from. They all felt like they could be my loud brothers. I come from a loud family.
It was just peanut butter and jelly, you know? It just worked. Milwaukee always felt like the first city that I could play and people would come to. It just was this very supportive and wonderful scene. It felt like a family.
My future of touring heavily is kind of in question. I've done a lot of touring in my life, and I'm kind of onto other things now. But, moving forward, I kind of just want to do what I call “selfish touring,” where I go to the places I want to play and mainly because I miss people and I miss cities. So I wanted very much to come back to Milwaukee, especially Cactus Club.
I'm getting to the age where nostalgia is creeping in. I don't know about others, but it's kind of a weird thing in my life that I'm dealing with. I'm nostalgic, and I miss places that you go to and you have such wonderful experiences, then you don't see again for 10 years. So I just curated this tour to go back to some clubs that I just have wonderful memories from, especially for years with Milwaukee. I'll be very happy to return to the Cactus Club.
I think Cactus does evoke a lot of nostalgia for many artists. I feel like that's the club folks mentioned time and time again if they're not from here, like “Oh, that was my favorite place.”
There's magic in rooms. You know, I've toured long enough to know that it has nothing to do with anything but just the vibe, you know? You walk into certain places around this country, and you just think there has been so much beautiful music and beautiful memories made in rooms, and you just get that from the smell and the walls and the whole ambiance of Cactus. It’s just the best.
I want to talk a little bit about you building your last album. You mentioned on Bandcamp that it took about three years to build it, and it's your eighth album. It's called Miracle Focus. Was it a slow build, or was it a sporadic build?
It was a very purposeful build. I have made records in kind of a reactionary sense in the past, where I feel something, I’m experiencing something, and then I make a record to kind of answer that. Miracle Focus came from a very different place where I started at around 40, trying to resolve issues in my life and trying to find some peace. I have kind of a “wild mind” as many of us do, and I just began to love myself maybe some more and tried to put to bed some patterns in my life and traumatic things that kept boiling up.
I wanted to make a record and take my time and actually make a record that can translate goodness, and I wanted to make an album that maybe, for the first time in my career, provided a service instead of a product of like, “If you connect with this, I hope it makes you feel better because we've traveled the existential seas together for many years and many songs.”
So I spent a lot of time building a very particular style of music that I heard in my head, but I found it took a long time to then put it into music. It also took three years because I was cast in a television show for two years, so that kind of took up a huge amount of my life and also brought in a great amount of inspiration and courage to try something new.
It was just a really productive and fruitful three years that all accumulated into what Miracle Focus became.
You mentioned, too, that you became two very unusual things during this time: You became an actor and also you became a painter. Which one came first?
Painting! We moved into our house, [and] we had lived in an apartment before. Coming from Indiana, I'm a pretty “cosmic” artistic person, but also a pragmatic, you know? I carry that with me, and I just realized we had a lot of walls that had zero things on it. And then the pandemic came around, so I decided I just want to fill my walls up. So I started buying canvases and kind of going in my garage and just tried to naturally find that expression.
But, unbeknownst to me, I think that maybe a painter lived in me all along. I started putting [paintings] online and then getting commissions. It quickly became my job for a while, where I would get people that would want to have a painting made, and we'd have these wonderful interactions and meetings. Then I would make paintings a lot for families, and they kind of went all over the world.
So I was in the process of painting and not really doing much music. And then, suddenly, I was cast as like a villainous biker [laughs]. That kind of came from the stars, you know? It came out of nowhere, and I'm at the point in my life where I just am ready to say yes. I was kind of nervous and scared, but I had done music for so long, and I love doing it, but it kind of was the same thing for 20 years of my life, and it was really exciting to be nervous again, to try something that I wasn't familiar with.
I think it's a good lesson for everybody. I love seeing people as they get older just decide, for example, “I'm going to take piano lessons. I don't know how to do it.” And I think it's good for your mental acuity. Your brain starts activating more when you're stepping out of the patterns of life. Yeah, painting and acting — I never thought I would have that on my resume.
I do think the pandemic let us have a lot of downtime we didn't have before to explore more creative projects or even just get out in nature. But I’m so wildly curious to know: How on Earth did acting, TV acting of all things, fall into your lap? Did you reach out and grab an opportunity? How did that happen?
I don't mean to make everything so Midwestern-centric, but I don't get a chance to have that familiarity in interviews often. I feel like my dad, for example, if he would meet Paul McCartney or the janitor at the venue, he would treat both the same and be equally as excited.
So I had a dinner with the creator of Mayans M.C., Elgin James, and we had dinner in Los Angeles because we wanted to just meet each other ‘cause he had used Strand of Oaks songs in previous seasons. We just had this four-hour dinner where we're just talking about records and guitars and just all of the things that you do when you meet people, and I didn't treat him like he was anything more special than anyone else. We just met his buddies, etc.
Then, like, two days later, I got an email from the Walt Disney / FX Corporation that said, “You are now cast as the character ‘Hoosier,’” which made me even more proud, being from Indiana. I never auditioned. I spent 10 episodes wondering if I could even act. Still to be determined. We'll see.
I look the part. That's the one thing I had going for me. When we'd go to makeup, everyone else would spend so much time in the chair, getting prepared to look like a villainous villain, and I would just sit down, and they'd be like, “Do you need any sunscreen? ‘Cause you're good to go!”
Yeah. You're such a natural villain [laughs].
I had to stop myself from smiling, though, ‘cause I was just so excited every moment on set, and they'd have to remind me, “You have to look angry.” I was like, “Okay, got it. I'll stop smiling.”
I can't picture you having a villainous countenance or whatever, but I'm stoked to see this television show, now.
It's pretty magic to see how all that stuff works. I just have this newfound artistic appreciation for how every single element to make something like a TV show happens. How everyone is so good at what they do, every level of the show. I was just in awe being there.
Talking about influences on this new record, I love that you mention that the dichotomy of this record's influences are Ram Dass, yoga, Freddie Mercury, Alice Coltrane and the Beastie Boys. How long have these influences all been brewing together?
I think that's what painting helped. It helped me live in the conceptual realm, and it helped me marry things that I would never have imagined put together until you start seeing how everything's connected.
For instance, the fun of Beastie Boys. For my whole life, Beastie Boys have just made me smile. Similar to Freddie Mercury. The epicness of Freddie Mercury, especially a newfound appreciation I have for what he brought to this world.
And then, the more I was introduced over the past few years to mindfulness practices and Ram Dass, I’d listen to him when I was painting, and he brought a lot of peace to my life, and he helped settle my anxiety a lot and helped me open myself up to the greater, connected world. And I first heard Alice Coltrane years ago, but she had recently rereleased albums with her singing.
I have been on the hunt my whole life for kind of the “center of the universe” when it comes to music. When you're a music fan, you hear a band on the radio, and then you hear who they're influenced by, and you keep digging deeper and deeper. And I feel as though when I heard Alice Coltrane sing, I went, “This is the center of it all. Like, this is why music was made — so she could sing it in her way.”
I just took all of these different things. My mind was basically just looking for antennas or beacons to lead me toward fascination and inspiration. It came from painters. It came from watching old skateboard videos I loved as a kid and all these things that just brought me joy and brought me a connected feeling to the greater whole, and they all amalgamated themselves into a synth-opera that I wasn't expecting.
A lot of people are wondering if this was my plan all along, and I just think it was the first time in my life where I just kind of settled my mind, and I was in a really blissful place in my personal life, and I just kind of let it flow through into the songs, and they just started being born.
I felt like — writing Miracle Focus — I was just trying to keep up with wherever I was making music that I wasn’t caught up to yet, almost, and it was like getting to know it and slowly working on it like a painting. You can add, you can take away, you can keep making it more precise to the vision.
That's really an interesting way of saying it, like you haven't caught up to your own creativity quite yet. That's when you know you're in a flow state of sorts, I'd say.
Yes! That's a perfect way to put it. And I didn't know why that was. ‘Cause if you watch someone that's great at what they do, whether it's a chef or a dancer or someone in a great interview even, you know that there is that flow state where it kind of goes beyond the constrictions of your capabilities. And then you just think, “wow.” Flow state is such a cool word, too. I love that word.
Speaking of flow state, you're kind of embarking on a little bit of a tour. Do you think it's easier or more difficult to be in a flow state when you're on tour?
I think all of the work it takes to make a tour happen, I truly do believe if you step onstage and it sounds okay and your guitar’s working, it's worth it. I have had the most stressful days in my life on the road, and if the show is correct, all is forgiven, you know? It just vanishes into the show.
I've been doing this for a while. I've played festival concerts where there's 60,000 people there that I'm vibing with, and I've also played shows where there's 10 people that I'm vibing with. There's a magic that happens with live music, and not just the performer, but the fact that we've all decided to be in a room together and make this our moment that we spend. [It’s] something that is sacred and really special to my life.
I definitely think that I would prefer not to be gone. I think part of the reason why I'm not touring as much is [that] I've got a lot of stuff in my mind that I want to accomplish, and it's just tough to be gone for six, seven weeks at a time. I’ve done that before, and moving forward I just want quality over quantity, I guess.
You whittle down what is the most important thing to you to be a happy, functional person, and sometimes being on the road doesn't get you there.
It's tough. Not to get too personal, but I stopped drinking six years ago, and it's still kind of hard for me to hang around in bars. It's not the easiest spot, and that's typically where you play music. So I also have to be slightly protective of myself. Not that I ever worry about it — it's just a different vibe for me. When I was drinking, it kind of provided an armor of confidence. With that removed, you're much more aware of existence.
Performing or even just being in a club can be a very triggering space just because all eyes are on you; one of the most challenging things about being a musician is being in front of people, you know?
I always said, though, it's kind of a joke: You know how there's stage fright? I have life fright. Not, like, terrible, but you know I'm more concerned about finding parking than playing the festival.
I feel like I've had situations playing live before where, for example, we were playing a festival years ago, and I was so into the music that I didn't realize that my booking agent grabbed me and yanked me off stage at this festival because there was 100-mile-an-hour winds blowing, and the stage was being lifted like a parachute. I was so in it that I had no idea that was happening.
Oh my gosh.
So, yeah, I get pretty deep when I'm onstage.
My goodness. Well, Tim, I want to ask one final question. I don't know how we can top that, by the way. What are you looking forward to most with your show in Milwaukee? It looks like the tour kind of ends there, but then you pick it up again in September in Europe for a bunch of dates. What are you honing in on as you head toward Milwaukee, this place full of these great memories for you?
Just friends. I hope my friends come out, people I haven't seen in a while. I miss a lot of people there. Honestly, I just hope people come out. Tickets are moving pretty slow. I'm not sure if people even remember Strand of Oaks at this point. But if people come out, It’ll just be nice to see some familiar faces. Because, you know, there was a few years where we couldn't see anybody, and now the fact that we can, I'm just excited to make up for lost time.
I'm sure Milwaukee remembers you. You’re gonna see those tickets pick up. The show is coming up on Sunday, July 21, at Cactus Club. Tim Showalter of Strand of Oaks has so many great albums under his belt. This one is his eighth. It's called Miracle Focus. It's out now on Western Vinyl. Thank you for talking to me, Tim.
Thank you, Erin. So nice to connect again.
