eMusic Selects: Strand of Oaks
Featured Album
[eMusic Selects is a program designed by eMusic to give exposure to unsigned or undersigned bands. This month's selections are Strand of Oaks and Family Band]
In 2003, Tim Showalter’s house burned down, his fiancée broke up with him, and he resorted to writing songs on an acoustic guitar while living on park benches in suburban Philadelphia. Those events informed the entirety of his arresting debut, Leave Ruin, an album about loss and brokenness and lack of faith. But as affecting as it was, Showalter is leery of being stuck in the past. After all, the first word of that record’s title is “leave,” and one of the first thing he asks when contacted for this interview is, “Can we kind of re-do my bio? I don’t want to keep being the sad sack whose house burned down.”
These days, Showalter is happily married and comfortably settled in Philadelphia, and he’s staring down the release of his second record, Pope Killdragon, an album that’s even stranger and more singular. Where Ruin was stark and autobiographical, Killdragon — which features odd, laser-beam synthesizers and one bona fide stoner metal track — is wild and fantastical. Showalter either invents characters whole cloth, or takes an approach to history so liberal even Tarantino would give pause (John F. Kennedy authors a fable about a knight; Dan Aykroyd carries out a revenge killing for the death of John Belushi). It’s a bold, eerie, mighty work — though the man responsible for it couldn’t be more affable or good natured. During the course of our interview, he laughs almost as often as he speaks.
eMusic’s J. Edward Keyes talked to Showalter while he was visiting his parents in Indiana.
On the best way to pick up chicks:
The way I met my wife — we were at a party where I was living, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and there were a bunch of people around. I was really upset, and probably drinking a lot, so I left the party and I walked to this video store that illegally sold fireworks — it had blown up two days earlier because the fireworks had gone off accidentally. So I went in and filled a bookbag full of bricks, and then I walked back to the party and dumped them all out on the table and told my friends, “I’m sick of you guys!” And then I looked at this girl and said, “But you? I wanna take you on a date.” And then I just kind of disappeared.
We dated for about five years, and I proposed at this beautiful area called Assateague Island in Maryland. I had put the engagement ring in my reading glasses case — but I forgot to bring a book with me. So I pretty much had no legitimate excuse to bring out my reading glasses while we were out on the beach. So I just ended up just asking, “Uh, can I see my glasses case?” And then after she gave it to me — and I don’t know what possessed me to do this — I just walked to the ocean and stood in there, knee-deep, for about a half hour, just staring into the abyss. I guess the whole decision just rushed over me. And I looked like a weirdo, again. So, full cycle.
On the shift from autobiography to fantasy:
This record is much harder to explain than, you know, me just being heartbroken — or whatever the first record was about. I wanted to treat this record it like a band in the ’70s making a record — I wanted to build a mythology around it, almost like a Lord of the Rings journey running through it. So that even if I’m the only one who has nerded out to that extent on the record, I wanted to know that I could probably make a graphic novel based on the record. I feel like these characters are just as much “me” as on the last record, but they’re me as if I was a character called Killdragon, or as if I was a giant that lived after a nuclear war. And I still had the same problems in my life — because these fantastic characters are still dealing with missing their mom, or trying to grow up. They’re going through the same normal emotions, they’re just giants, or John Belushi.
On who, exactly, Pope Killdragon is:
On the night Pope John Paul II died, I must have been either really lonely or I was drinking or I was in kind of a weird unstable point in my life, and I realized that you can change your name when you become the pope. At that moment, I decided that I would change my name to Pope Killdragon. That’s where this fantasy began. Killdragon actually showed up on my first record in a song called “Sister Evangeline.” That song was originally intended to be on this record.
Killdragon is essentially my outlook on the world — it’s not necessarily a religious fervor, where he’s looking for Mary or Jesus or whatever, it’s more the purity of it all. He doesn’t necessarily want to be a religious person. I think he’s lonely, and he wants everything to not be so chaotic and falling apart all the time.
On the sudden appearance of synthesizers:
I knew the lyrics for this record, and I didn’t want them to be backed up by banjo and mandolin. It wouldn’t have worked for me. I wanted them to represent a certain time in my childhood. I’d watch movies, like Flight of the Navigator, and those were the kinds of synthesizers those composers were using at the time. So they were used not so much to be instruments but to be a nostalgic reminder. They still sound futuristic to me, yet they still sound nostalgic.
I actually feel like my first record was a step away from my musical taste. It was so based around organic and wooden instruments, but really, my first band consisted of synthesizers and a drum machine. I’ve had this lifelong love of keyboards — I’d look at music magazines or music stores and drool over these keyboards. I’d buy books about vintage keyboards. I loved them for so long, they’re something I can relate to so deeply, so I was really anxious to incorporate them into my music. I mixed this record at my friend’s studio in Akron, and he probably had $70,000 worth of vintage synthesizers there. It basically was the equivalent of me in 3rd grade going into the store and seeing that big shelving unit of NES games, and being able to get whichever one I wanted.
On JFK in Carbondale, Pennsylvania:
I wrote the song “Sterling” right after my grandpa died. My grandpa was kind of my second dad and, really, my hero in life. He was almost a demigod — he was always so strong and so smart — it was just a huge loss. At that same time that I lost my grandpa, I was living underneath this legendary hotel in Wilkes-Barre called the Hotel Sterling. It was this beautiful hotel that had been there forever, and actually JFK stayed there one night. All of that song is referencing places around the Wyoming Valley — Carbondale is the town north of Wilkes-Barre, it’s the last stop of the train that runs through the valley. It also cross-references Sister Evangeline in the line “pledged toward celibacy.”
So, suddenly, through all of this weird blending, Kennedy kind of became my grandfather. He was this person that was sitting at the Sterling with me and giving me life advice, and he was also taking me on a tour of the valley — which becomes a mental map of my life. There’s a line in the song, “So we sat down on the ledge/ and looked down toward the West.” Well, if you look West from the Hotel Sterling, that’s where my house burned down.
On the revenge fantasies of Dan Aykroyd: The genesis of “Daniel’s Blues” was that my dad loves the Blues Brothers. Just like the synthesizers, this is a nostalgic thing for my life — always having the Blues Brothers movie on, I remember the vinyl my dad had of the Blues Brothers soundtrack. At one point, I thought about Dan Aykroyd the night John Belushi died, and what he might have gone through. I thought, “If this happened to my best friend, I would temporarily lose my mind.” So I guess I thought about what I might do if my best friend died, and I thought, “Well, I would go and kill the drug dealer that sold the speedball to John Belushi.” I also kind of invented a chronological timeline where he meets Bill Murray — and a lot of people have come up to me and corrected me, saying “Well, that didn’t happen then.” I don’t really care — I just like the story.
On how a folk guy writes a stoner metal song:
I wrote the riff for “Giant’s Despair” a long time ago. Giant’s Despair is this overlook in Wilkes-Barre where these pornographers tried to build a mansion. They ran out of money, so there’s just this concrete slab that overlooks the whole valley. Everyone tags it and graffitis it, and it’s where I would sit and perch above the whole valley. It’s incredible, but it is called Giant’s Despair. In a lot of ways, this song was the biggest risk I think I took on the record. I didn’t want it to sound funny, like a dork making a metal song. But I needed a song to show musically what the album was saying. I didn’t want to sing on this song, so I just put nine guitars on the song, Billy Corgan style, and it just explodes. Even when I was recording it, my friend said, “Are you sure you wanna have all these guitars?” And I said, “I can’t not have these guitars on here.” As the guy who came from a banjo record beforehand, I know it’s a leap, but it needed to be on there just as much as the synthesizers needed to be on there.
