Stray Fossa holds an album release party at the Southern on Saturday. Publicity image.
Jam packed: As kids, brothers Nick and Will Evans teamed up with their friend Zach Blount to write music. The three reconnected in 2018, moving to Charlottesville to build a music studio in their attic, and performing under the name Stray Fossa. In April, the trio released their self-produced pandemic baby, With You For Ever, a sunny album packed with dreamy harmonies, woozy slide guitar, and pleasantly distorted leads. Celebrate the album’s release with the band and indie-pop openers Dreamgirl and Films on Song (with former C-VILLE writer Erin O’Hare on bass).
Saturday 10/9. $10-12, 8pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St., 977-5590.
Charlottesville band Stray Fossa have released their first full-length album. Supplied Photo.
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.
Matthew E. White & Lonnie Holley
Broken Mirror, A Selfie Reflection
Spacebomb/Jagjaguwar
For his latest solo effort, the mastermind behind Richmond’s Spacebomb Records has teamed up with 70-year-old Alabama singer Lonnie Holley. Before pursuing music, Holley was known for his work as a visual artist, crafting sculptures and environments from found objects. When Matthew E. White asked Holley to write and sing across a batch of instrumentals that he had recorded with the Spacebomb house band, Holley applied the same artistic aesthetic to the project. Comprised of five extended “compositions,” Broken Mirror, A Selfie Reflection is an indulgent, dreamlike amalgam of sound and imagery that serves as a commentary on life in the digital era. The title track, “Broken Mirror (A Selfie Reflection)/Composition 9,” is a 10-minute romp of chants and synth layers that draws on cultural tropes like “mirror, mirror on the wall,” and the threat of “seven years of bad luck,” as the narrator stares at his own image on a cell phone. This record isn’t a casual listen, but rather, a thought-provoking one that manages to be entirely futuristic while remaining rooted in the present. (Released April 9)
Born and raised in Lexington, Virginia, Vivian Leva had a vast musical training ground right at home: Her parents are veteran old-time musicians who have been performing for over a decade as Jones & Leva. Alongside her mom, Leva brought the sounds of the Blue Ridge Mountains to Washington state as a workshop teacher in the summer of 2016. There, she met Riley Calcagno, a member of the string band The Onlies. They forged a musical partnership, and Calcagno contributed to Leva’s 2018 debut, Time Is Everything. Now, the duo has released its first proper full-length, a beautiful integration of indie-folk, mountain music, and classic country. The pair’s pure harmonies unfurl over virtuosic finger-picking, as they tackle themes of heartbreak (“Will You”), the sublime (“Love and Chains”), and loneliness (“Biding All My Time”). Leva and Calcagno are more than the sum of their parts, and while they currently reside in Portland, Oregon, their self-titled disc is pure Appalachia. (Released March 12)
Stray Fossa
With You For Ever
Nice Guys Records
Brothers Nick and Will Evans grew up in southern Tennessee, and along with childhood friend Zach Blount, they wrote songs and played in bands together throughout high school. The trio went their separate ways for college, but after graduate stints across the globe in Berlin and the U.K., they reformed as Stray Fossa in Charlottesville in 2018. (Will had attended undergrad at the University of Virginia, and Charlottesville’s burgeoning music scene seemed like a good place to kick-start their musical pursuits.) The group built a studio in an attic, where the guys recorded a handful of EPs as well as their full-length debut, With You For Ever. Written in the beginning stages of the pandemic, the album not only reflects the surreal aspects of a global health crisis and social isolation, but also brims with nostalgia, offering a joyous and hopeful reprieve of shimmery dream pop. Standout track “Bright Ahead” boasts a maturation in sound from the band’s early work, while highlights like “Orange Days’’ take a wistful look in the rearview. With You For Ever is a collection to get lost in, washing over the listener in a wave of keys, steady percussion, reverb, and gossamer vocals. (Release March 9)
Astronomers headlines the annual May The Fourth Be With You concert, held this year at IX Art Park. Publicity photo
By Sean McGoey
arts@c-ville.com
Star Wars enthusiasts have a lot to be thrilled about this year: The first trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker dropped in April, setting the table for the conclusion of the latest trilogy and sparking speculation over the inclusion of Emperor Palpatine’s sinister laugh at the end of the trailer. And the television series “The Mandalorian,” a space opera web series set in the Star Wars universe, is predicted to be one of the centerpieces of Disney’s new streaming service. But those new projects will require patience. “The Mandalorian” doesn’t air until November, and The Rise of Skywalker debuts on December 20.
Here in Charlottesville, fans of Star Wars and other science fiction can get their fix when IX Art Park hosts the sixth annual May the Fourth Be With You show, where local bands pay homage to the music of sci-fi movies, songs about aliens and lasers, and campy pop tunes from movies and TV shows.
The bands on the roster all share a love of science fiction and fantasy. Stray Fossa frontman Nick Evans recalls dressing as Star Wars characters for Halloween with his brother Will, the band’s drummer, and reading Star Wars: The Complete Visual Dictionary. And Little Graves’ bassist Les Whittaker is a self-proclaimed “total nerd,” citing Ridley Scott’s 1982 epic Blade Runner and the books of William Gibson and John Steakley as favorites.
Goddess ov Mindxpansion’s lo-fi guitars and guttural vocals kick off the show, which will feature everything from YonderPhonics’ funky garage-jazz and Little Graves’ mixture of heavy post-punk and field recordings to the “dense bizarro rap” of dogfuck, who promoter Jeyon Falsini likes to refer to as “dog-friendly.”
“I am not sure if I am more excited to play or see what the other bands will do,” says Evans. Stray Fossa, who relocated from Sewanee, Tennessee, to Charlottesville last year after a multi-year hiatus, will be playing its first May the Fourth show, as will closing act Astronomers.
“The show’s date finally falling on a Saturday and Astronomers headlining is a solid pairing of circumstances,” says master of ceremonies Rupert Quaintance. “We’ve approached them in the past but their schedule never lined up. They’re a crowd favorite. …Even their name lends itself to the aesthetic.”
May the Fourth Be With You is Quaintance’s brainchild. He has partnered with Falsini’s booking and promotion company, Magnus Music, to host the event since 2014. “I wanted there to be an event where people can just zone out into their own brand of nerdiness and feel unabashed about it,” Quaintance says. May 4, which happens to be Quaintance’s birthday, is known by fans as Star Wars Day, but the pair put their own spin on the Charlottesville event. Falsini says they made covers of science fiction- themed songs a requirement to be in the lineup from the very beginning in 2014.
This will be the second May the Fourth since The Ante Room —along with Escafé and the Main Street Arena—closed to make way for the Center of Developing Entrepreneurs, and that still hits a raw nerve for people who miss the inclusive concert venue.
“I can’t say enough about The Ante Room,” Quaintance says. “[Jeyon] had the wherewithal and gumption to open The Ante Room to metal acts and hip-hop events and all sorts of lovely, eclectic things.”
“We were in a really good groove with that space,” says Falsini, who owned The Ante Room since it opened as The Annex in 2012. “But at the end of the day, Charlottesville…just needs stability when it comes to its music venues if it intends to keep fostering the musical arts.”
Despite the lingering disappointment over that space’s closing, an air of optimism surrounds not just May the Fourth, but the music scene in Charlottesville, in no small part due to the presence of welcoming, communal spaces like IX and the efforts of the people who work to keep the scene vibrant and inclusive.
“I’m super thankful for the efforts of folks like Jeyon Falsini, Angel Metro, and Sam Roberts, who do look out for local weirdo musicians and put together the kinds of shows that probably wouldn’t even be a consideration elsewhere,” says Little Graves’ guitarist/sampler Luis Soler.
But it requires more than just the efforts of hardworking bookers and promoters.
“Supporting those people and places usually means more than just showing up,” Soler said. “It’s also an opportunity for people to get in on the ground floor and make things happen, think outside the box, and evolve the scene into its next incarnation. Gotta be the change you want to see, right?”
May The Fourth Be With You takes place May 4 at IX Art Park
Getting added to one of Spotify’s curated playlists gave Alethea Leventhal’s “Ships In The Night” new listeners, but not a big payday. Photo by Tristan Williams
Paul Curreri remembers getting rid of his CD collection. He and his wife, Devon Sproule, both musicians, were packing up their Austin, Texas, home to move back to Charlottesville in 2015, when Curreri realized he hadn’t added to his CD collection in a while. “There wasn’t a bad one in the bunch,” he says of the 2,500-odd discs. The collection “used to be super fun, and vital, and alive,” he says, but once he stopped adding to it, it wasn’t fun anymore. Curreri sold it all for about $400.
Paul Curreri
“Now we have Spotify, and we have Pandora, and [I have it all] technically, on a hard drive somewhere. …But then I open up Spotify and I literally can’t think of artists. It drives me nuts! It’s like I’ve lost my entire filing system without having [the albums physically] on the wall,” he says.
Curreri’s story likely sounds familiar, and it demonstrates how consuming and appreciating music has changed drastically in recent years.
There’s no shortage of talk about this on music blogs and in entertainment magazines, particularly how the advent of streaming pays artists only a fraction of a cent per song play. But how is it affecting non-superstar local artists, in a small city with a fairly robust music scene?
It’s hard to find an exact number for how much a single-song stream pays. “It is pretty meager,” says Alethea Leventhal, who records dark electronic, ethereal synthesizer lullabies under the moniker Ships in the Night.
Conversations with Charlottesville-area musicians of many genres reveal that for the most part, they’re not in it for the money; they’re in it because they have something to say and to share.
Curreri says that when he began recording and releasing music in the early 2000s, he got regular checks, for hundreds of dollars a week, from his distribution service, CD Baby. His records were well-received by critics and audiences, and he started selling enough albums to make his money back on recording, and then some. But just when it seemed like he could make a real living off music, sometime around 2007 the checks started shrinking. That was the year Radiohead released In Rainbows, not as a CD, but as a pay-what-you-want download, and arguably altered the way people thought about releasing and purchasing music. (The physical version of In Rainbows was offered in January 2008 through Coran Capshaw’s TBD label, and was certified gold with 500,000 copies sold by March 2008.)
Crunching the numbers
BuzzAngle Music’s 2018 data shows that people are listening to more music than ever, but purchasing less with each passing year.
701 million
Total album consumption in 2018, including physical, digital, and streams (up 16.2 percent over 2017)
5.8 billion
Total song consumption (27.4 percent increase over 2017)
809.5 billion
Total on-demand streams (35.4 percent increase over 2017)
121.2 million
Album and song sales (a combineddecrease of 189.6 million—in 2018, there was not a single song that broke one million in sales)
Now, artists often record their music at a personal financial loss and rely on live shows—their cut of the door, plus merch and physical music sales—to make money from music.
Last year, one of Leventhal’s songs made it on to a curated Spotify playlist—a placement that Curreri likens to “getting on Letterman”—and while she only made a few hundred dollars from the resulting streams, she saw it as a channel to new ears. Perhaps some of those listeners came out to one of the 70-plus shows she played last year, or shared the song with a friend.
“That’s what inspires me to always keep sharing music,” says Leventhal. “Just that one person in a sea of many who it really, really reaches, and maybe helps.”
Kai Crowe-Getty
“We see Spotify not as a revenue stream, but a carrot to get people to come to our show,” where they’ll have a good time, buy merch, and hopefully see the band next time it rolls through town, says Kai Crowe-Getty, guitarist and vocalist for Americana/Southern rock band Lord Nelson.
“People want to experience things together, in the dark, with people they know and don’t know,” says Crowe-Getty. That part of enjoying music hasn’t changed, though he scratches his head at how some folks shell out $150 for a concert ticket, but not $15 for an album.
Indie rock band Stray Fossa had a few songs appear on various music blog playlists, and in November 2018, its single “Commotion” appeared (how, the band has no idea) on Spotify’s “Fresh Finds” and “Fresh Finds: Six Strings” playlists. Bassist Zach Blount says that while the resulting tens of thousands of song streams didn’t result in more physical or digital music sales via Stray Fossa’s Bandcamp page, “we have had people turn out for shows while on tour who said they had found us on Spotify and decided to check us out.”
Kate Bollinger, a third-year student at UVA, only releases her music digitally right now, with many tracks exclusively available on Spotify. She approached the platform, with its 87 million paying subscribers, not as a money maker, but as a way to get heard.
Last year, her song “Tests” appeared on a YouTube playlist with a considerable following, and was later added to several Spotify playlists. As a result, her songs now have more than 80,000 monthly listeners, and she’s almost certain that her Spotify artist page is what got a recent show mentioned in the New York Times.
Bollinger says that her Spotify success hasn’t resulted in a big check (or any check, yet), but it gives her confidence that music is something to pursue long-term.
Local rapper Kevin Skinner, aka Sondai, has previously told C-VILLE something similar: so far his 2017 single “One Chick” has more than 2.2 million listens on Spotify alone.
Curreri is now part of the growing group of artists, like Bollinger, that releases music exclusively online. He and Sproule have a Patreon page, where they release at least two new things—usually original songs, sometimes covers, videos, or even essays—each month, and supporters choose how much they want to pay per release. It averages out to about $400 a song, says Curreri, so while it’s not bad, it’s not enough to make a living. Part of why Curreri agreed to be interviewed for this story, he says with a laugh, is because he hopes a reader might think, “I’d like to hear what Devon and Paul are doing.”
Curreri implies that all is not lost—musicians are still making music, and people are still listening to it. He and Sproule have about 30 songs up on their page—making at least two songs every month “is something we would not have done otherwise,” says Curreri.
“It’s a huge priority for me. It’s our work, and our art, and our opportunity and platform to present something to an audience, to insert something into the universe.”
Stray Fossa closes its first Northeast tour with a show at
The Southern Café and Music Hall on Friday. Photo by Tristan Williams
Nick Evans sometimes wakes at “god-awful hours of the night” to find his brother, Will, in the living room, sitting quietly amid microphones, coiled cables, amps, guitars, and drums, his shoulders hunched toward his computer, the blue-white glow of the screen illuminating his face, laser-focused, with headphones covering his ears.
Nick laughs as he describes the frequent scene—“it’s not very cozy…not a livable space at all,” he says of the room, which, with its abundance of gear and its walls covered in padded packing blankets, is more recording studio than living room.
He laughs not to mock, but rather to appreciate his younger brother’s attention to detail: Will’s focus is always set on some aspect of a song for Stray Fossa, the poppy, shimmery, atmospheric three-piece rock band comprised of the Evans brothers and their longtime friend (and now housemate) Zach Blount.
All three members of Stray Fossa grew up in Sewanee, a small town in southern Tennessee, and they’ve been friends since they were kids—Will and Zach have celebrated their birthdays together since they were 5 years old, says Nick, who is two years older.
They played music together throughout high school (their parents served as their roadies), but left the project behind as each member graduated and went on to pursue his own interests.
Nick moved to Berlin for graduate school and performed guitar-driven, solo singer-songwriter material all the while; Zach played bass in a number of jazz and funk bands in college; Will honed his percussion chops as an undergrad at UVA, playing in a few local bands before moving to the United Kingdom for a year-long graduate program, where he started focusing more on music production (and developed the habit of staying up late to obsess over details).
It’s been “a study in compromise, getting back together. We aren’t a high school group of friends anymore,” says Stray Fossa guitarist Nick Evans. Photo by Tristan Williams
During that time and distance, there was never any question that they would play music together again. A few years ago they reunited in Sewanee, and “the stars aligned for all of us,” says Nick—they wanted to give music another go. “To be fair, we made the stars align,” Will interjects, to laughter from his bandmates.
The group considered moving to Nashville, but it’s too big. They love their hometown of Sewanee, but it’s too small. Charlottesville—a growing city in the middle of the East Coast with a robust music scene and a clear venue ladder to climb, a place where Will had some connections—was just right.
Stray Fossa arrived in town about a year ago, without a single song. After getting their bearings—mostly finding Kroger and Lowe’s—the guys transformed their living room into a studio and got to work.
It’s been “a study in compromise, getting back together,” says Nick. “We aren’t a high school group of friends anymore.” They’ve had to figure out how to live together and how to be creative together.
Local band Stray Fossa closes its first Northeast tour with a show at The Southern Cafe and Music Hall on Friday. Photo by Tristan Williams
And that’s a good thing, if you ask them. The music they’re making now, as Stray Fossa, is much more intentional, says Will. They have more to say in their songs, and they know why they want to—and sometimes have to—say it.
In September, the band released its debut EP, a three-song effort titled Sleeper Strip after the catchiest song of the three, one with an earworm of a melody and lyrics that hold particular emotional meaning for Nick.
There’s “Bear the Waves,” a Will-penned tune about his general reluctance to go out and party, and “Miss the Darker Nights,” a subtle call to conservationism that is also an homage to the band’s wooded hometown—while living in Berlin, one of the largest cities in the world, Nick was overwhelmed by the light pollution, and he missed the noise of the forest. In the summer, he says, with the cicadas and the katydids, all the animals scurrying and birds flying around, the forest is actually quite loud.
Recently, the band released a new track, “Commotion,” which was featured on Spotify’s popular “Fresh Finds” and “Fresh Finds: Six Strings” playlists. So far, all of these songs have been written, recorded, and produced in Stray Fossa’s living room studio.
The band grows its songs collectively, with all three members contributing parts to the whole. “We come together in the middle every time,” says Zach, who gets “a lot of satisfaction from writing icing on the cake kind of stuff,” like harmonies and bass parts that capture the emotional quality of a song. Nick and Will do the majority of the songwriting, though each brother has a different process: Nick brings a kernel to build around; whereas Will brings a nearly complete song.
In the current music landscape, there’s a lot of emphasis on a band’s “sound,” and while Stray Fossa understands why—it can help bands stick out in this world of constant music consumption—the threesome doesn’t want to limit itself by attempting to develop a sonic identity that might constrict it in the future.
“As long as we’re the ones on the track and the ones with the creative energy, it’s going to be our sound,” says Zach, to a round of enthusiastic nodding from his bandmates.
They’re not seeking a revelation about who they are; they just want to say that they’re here.
