Strand of Oaks w/Chris DeMay

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As Strand of Oaks, Timothy Showalter has been making vivid, compelling folk albums for years. But he’d never made one as loud as his 2014 reinvention Heal. For that record, Showalter looked back at his life growing up in Goshen, Ind., and listening to bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, and realized he needed to hit the reset button to get back to music he was supposed to make. “I love folk music and love the sounds and feeling you get when you play it but I was done with it,” Showalter told the Shepherd at the time. “I needed to embrace the inner head-bang kid that I was and just make that kind of record.” Some of that heaviness carries through his latest album, 2017’s Hard Love, a druggier, trippier record than its predecessor, but one that features some of his most personal songwriting yet (which is saying something). This winter he released a companion album, Harder Love, which features earlier, often even weirder versions of the songs on Hard Love, as well as some other unreleased material.