Strand of Oaks

The Fader:

There’s a personal touch to “Goshen 97,” the opening track of HEAL, Timothy Showalter’s upcoming album under his Strand of Oaks alias. The rock song’s unfussy lyrics offer a glimpse into the singer/songwriter’s teenage existence: he listens to Smashing Pumpkins, stashes cigarettes and porn mags under his bed and rots away in his parent’s basement in Indiana. The song’s video, directed by filmmaker Rick Alverson, stretches the too-relatable ‘I was lonely, but I was having fun’ refrain into a narrative about a listless chain-smoker, played by Showalter, who spends his empty days watching other people have fun inside a roller-skating rink. His moments of joy, isolated and fleeting, come only when he’s listening to music alone in his apartment. “The song doesn’t celebrate the huge victories in life or mourn the heaviest memories. It’s about the moments between the ups and downs,” Showalter says of the the noisy ballad, which features guitar-playing by J. Mascis. “That’s exactly what the video captures.”