The American dream-pop

Stray Fossa’s “Commotion” is a warm, upbeat indie jaunt—a glassy melody pings away over an active drum track while far-off vocals give the whole thing a touch of the surreal. The tune clocks in at under three minutes, but that was enough to catch the attention of NYC-based talent scout Matt Salavitch in mid-2018. Salavitch was looking for new and interesting artists to book for Rockwood Music Hall, a Lower East Side independent venue that’s been a beacon for up-and-coming and established artists for more than 15 years. When he heard “Commotion,” Salavitch  was immediately struck by its sound.   

“It evoked some of that Brooklyn shoegaze dream-pop,” he recalls.

It turned out that the band with the big, shimmery sound was neither big nor from New York, but a trio out of central Virginia. Salavitch booked the group right away, and Stray Fossa joined the ranks of artists like Norah Jones, The Lumineers, and Sting when it took the stage at Rockwood.  

Brothers Nick Evans (guitar) and Will Evans (drums), along with their childhood friend Zach Blount (bass) make up the homegrown band, which had been operating as a strictly independent entity: When they played the first Rockwood show, they had no management or label, tackled regional show bookings on their own, and recorded all of their music in a de-facto studio they fashioned in their living room. But after their New York performance, Salavitch was so taken with the group that he offered to lend a hand with management responsibilities.

“The fact that I discovered Stray Fossa and they came to my attention was evidence of what they already had going outside of the Charlottesville scene,” he says. 

The group gained traction with a handful of singles and EPs, and there was no doubt that the music resonated with a wider audience. So their new manager encouraged them to record a proper full-length album.

With the space afforded by the pandemic and ensuing quarantine, the trio did just that. Released in early April, With You For Ever is a lush collection of synth-laden pop-rock. And it was a long time coming, to say the least.

The band members grew up in Sewanee, Tennessee, a small mountain town located between Chattanooga and Nashville. Nick and Will were raised in a musical household, where their parents’ record collection consisted of legendary albums by Simon & Garfunkel, David Bowie, and Brian Eno.

“We had this great library where [our dad] would get these concert DVDs, and he would basically give us a running commentary on his musical heroes,” Nick recalls.

In early high school, Nick (who is two years older than Will), picked up his dad’s guitar and began learning how to play. Will followed suit, taking up the drums, and inviting his best friend Zach to try his hand at the bass. Hours spent playing at each other’s houses slowly morphed into gigs around town and at area summer camps. Nick’s friend and classmate, Scott Owsley, would hang around in those days, too—but his instrument of choice was a camera. Now a television editor in New York City, Owsley taught himself how to edit using concert footage that he filmed during Stray Fossa shows in Sewanee, the summer before he and Nick went off to college.

Stray Fossa performing at the Southern. Photo: Tristan Williams

“The town itself has a culture around trying new things and defining your own artistic voice and I think a lot of it for them was figuring out what their voice would be,” Owsley says. “I definitely noticed that they started down that path in high school—not finding the sound itself, but it seemed like at the time they knew that that was the next step for them at a certain point.”

After high school, the musicians took a step back from Stray Fossa to follow their own paths. Nick attended Davidson College in North Carolina and, after graduating, moved to Berlin to do environmental advocacy work. Zach also graduated from Davidson, and returned to Sewanee to conduct psychological research. Will came to Charlottesville to attend the University of Virginia, and continued to build on a political ecology research project in Belize that he completed for his undergraduate thesis. Academic interests aside, they remained committed to playing music together, and all three moved to Charlottesville in 2017 to pick up where they’d left off—in search of their voice.

“We very much had to reinvent the wheel and learn how to play live together again,” says Zach. “Part of that was trying to figure out how to fill a room with only three people in a way that we were satisfied with. There’s tons of power trios out there—drums, bass, and guitar—and we always have a desire to produce more sound than what typically would be created by those three instruments.”

They rented a house together and now record out of a homemade studio in their attic. Nick experimented with guitar pedals; once he settled into a sound the rest of the band took it from there. Will spearheads engineering and production, and his detail-oriented work style involves layering and looping with a precision that allows the group to extend its music beyond the confines of a three-piece, creating the richness they had been searching for.

“I think we’re all very open to genre; we’re all open enough that in two years, we could have a very different sound,” Will says. “[A] big factor that influences our sound is the stuff that we’ve collected over the years. We still use the analog-to-digital converter boxes that we had when we were kids. We actually got so glued to it that we bought two; we had to go on eBay because no company still sells these things.”

While Stray Fossa could have chosen to settle closer to home in Nashville, the central Virginia music scene felt like the right fit.

“It was important to be in a place that really appreciates music, and a place where we felt we could actually jump in and get going,” Nick explains. “Charlottesville’s lent itself to that in a huge way, just because of how important the live music scene is, and how welcoming and gracious we’ve found it to be.”

With its strong network of community venues, central Virginia was a great training ground for booking shows. The group traveled from Blacksburg to Richmond to Harrisonburg and even to D.C. Will and Nick took jobs at the Southern and Zach started handling lights at the Jefferson, strengthening the group’s ties in town. 

House shows, they found, were also a great way to connect with other bands. They recall nights playing Charlottesville’s Magnolia House with area acts Gold Connections and Minor Poet, and it was at a house show in Harrisonburg where they first met the duo Illiterate Light, a band rising quickly on the national scene. After shows, Stray Fossa would ask Illiterate Light’s Jeff Gorman and Jake Cochran for feedback on the performance.

“They reminded me of me and Jeff when we started out,” says Cochran. “They’d ask us to tell them directly what worked and what didn’t work. It was very serious and they were very dedicated from the get-go.”

Both drummers and producers, Cochran and Will established a kinship that remains. Will sent Cochran early mixes of the tracks that make up With You For Ever.

“When I first heard [the finished album] I took a step back,” says Cochran. “This isn’t just a Charlottesville band; this isn’t just my friends’ band anymore. …The work that they did…took it from a cool, local, regional band to the next band that the world is waiting to discover.”

Find Stray Fossa’s music and merch at www.strayfossa.com.