Tim Showalter has been making records with his project Strand of Oaks for nearly a decade now.
Despite the following he's built around the U.S. and elsewhere, Showalter describes his career more as a journey of self discovery and realization than one of screaming audiences and blurred visions.
"I'd rather be making records now at 34 than at 24," he said. "I just know so much more now about how it works."
As a child in the '90s, Showalter was a radio head. He tells Jonathan Clarke and "Out of the Box" that he would obsess over songs he liked and wait hours for them to be played again so he could figure out who the artist was and record them onto a cassette.
"When you're that age," Showalter said, "there's no separation between a Led Zeppelin song and Bryan Adams. It's just all new and it's all music."
That nostalgia and unencumbered appreciation of sound, and the inherent mystery of the radio, is part of what inspired Strand of Oaks' new song, "Radio Kids."
Showalter goes on to describe the thinking behind his band's moniker, he plays a live acoustic version of "Hard Love" and asks if we're better of now than we've ever been?
Check out the interview and performance below!
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Here's the official music video for "Radio Kids" off Strand of Oaks' new album, Hard Love: