The way Timothy Showalter tells it, creating new music to be released under his preferred moniker Strand of Oaks wasn’t his idea. On his website, Showalter even openly ruminates on the possibility that he might have reached a creative endpoint if not for the intervention of some trusted cohorts, including a sizable chunk of the band My Morning Jacket. He wound up back in the studio, and the resulting album, Eraserland, arrives in the spring.

The new record was announced with a song. Lead single “Weird Ways” is a beauty, infused with a with a melancholy that slowly, unexpectedly transforms into something resembling quiet perseverance and hope. It’s a slow build that begins to reveal its deeper magic at the moment about a minute and a half in. After a opening of lithe vocals and plaintive acoustic guitar, the electric kicks in. A lean, sharp drum beat joins. The song simply, confidently expands. Another minute later, Strand of Oak reins it back in, creating an exquisite tension. It swells again.

Showalter implies a lot of personal rebuilding in reflected in the material he created for the new album, and that’s certainly the vibe of “Weird Ways.” It has some of borrowed classic rock majestic scope found on the most recent War on Drugs album, but it probes in a different way, at once more inquisitive and relaxed. Somewhere in those bars is the sound of an artist firmly finding himself.