Beneath the Layers of Safety

“My favorite thing is when people email me and tell me the record sounds like absolute shit,” Strand Of Oaks leader Tim Showalter says with a laugh. “That means I made HEAL dangerous enough.” With its unexpectedly loud guitars, fuzzy drums and raw shimmer punctuating beautifully quiet Americana-styled passages, HEAL is a major departure from his earlier folk-oriented releases—even if Showalter doesn’t see it that way. “Really, it’s different?” he asks. “I didn’t think it was different, but I literally wasn’t hearing things the way I did before.” “Before” was prior to a near-fatal Christmas Day car accident. Concussed and jacked up on painkillers, Showalter mixed HEAL anyway, peeling away the “layers of safety” masking his true feelings. “I was in this strange place,” Showalter recalls. “The process removed any barriers—there’s nowhere to hide.” Already a deeply personal album excising the demons of marital infidelity, career doubts and internal struggles, HEAL ultimately became Showalter’s salvation, a self-styled music therapy. “I can only scream so loud, but then, the guitar can take over and scream for me,” he says in partial defense. “You feel it, but I need it. It’s cathartic.”