In 2013, FayRoy’s van — effectively the band’s home during a cross-country tour — was stolen in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood of Chicago. Inside of the vehicle were seven guitars, a drum kit, synthesizers, amps, merchandise, camera equipment, surfboards and suitcases containing pretty much all of the clothes the band members owned. Local watering hole Moe’s Tavern held a benefit, but the band was stuck in the Windy City for a month as it picked up the pieces.
“Having everything of value to you stolen is insane,” guitarist and frontman Zack Hoag told CL. The 29-year-old and FayRoy’s longtime drummer Kyle Fournier grew up a lot after the burglary, and being in the band felt a lot more real moving forward.
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“It’s heartbreaking, but also liberating. To bounce back meant that we weren’t in it for fun, we were in it for the passion. We eventually rented a van and said, ‘Alright we gotta get back to California and rebuild.’”
Hoag’s roots are embedded in sugar-fine sands near Scruggs Harbor, a cluster of boutique cottages on Indian Rocks Beach. His dad Michael Hoag — a bassist who plays in a Bay area outlaw country band called Cottondale Swamp — raised Zack on '60s surf-rock icons like Dick Dale and The Ventures.
“My dad bred me into it, no choice. I was a total beach rat, lived in the ocean,” Hoag said. As a teen, he was adept enough at skimboarding to travel around the country to compete. He met his future drummer during a church retreat in Daytona; the two bonded over film, music and the fact that Hoag was infinitely funnier than Fournier, who is 31. They’ve been best buds ever since.
Fournier and Hoag’s journey eventually took FayRoy — which was named after a charming two-bedroom Scruggs Harbor cottage with a teak wood interior and wraparound windows that provided scenic ocean views — to San Francisco Bay, where they would spend three years. FayRoy’s self-titled debut full-length arrived a month after the bad luck in Chicago, and its 12 tracks updated the surf-rock sketches from a handful of demos and the band’s 2011 Sumo EP.
FayRoy’s opening track, “Align,” introduced the ethereal, often cinematic harmony-rich aesthetic that’s is a hallmark of the band’s sound. Fan-favorite “I Had That Feeling Myself” is marked by padded organ plunks plus the high-energy, noodly Spaghetti Western and staccato surf licks of a band that isn’t estranged from beachside benders or waking up next to a burned-out bonfire as the sunrise passes over the Intracoastal. It was the arrival, and it also ushered in the beginning of FayRoy’s move back home to Florida, where the band would eventually release last year’s Heaven at Twenty Seven, which was focused on making music with good friends (these days FayRoy also includes Orlando producer and songwriter Greyson Charnock and Bay area utility man Dallas Eubanks on guitar) while also wrestling with cliché, mid-20s existential crisis-type stuff.
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That album landed on CL’s 2017 list of the best local releases, but FayRoy’s forthcoming EP — Oh No, Oh Man, which the band will release at Fubar in St. Petersburg on August 24 — does less dancing around big topics and cuts to the heart of the exasperation of real-life situations.
“This is the most literal I think we’ve ever been. Like you’ve been working overtime all week, now you just got called in to work the weekend shift, it’s like, ‘Oh no… oh man’,” Hoag said.
The matter-of-fact approach comes with a hint of barn-burning, Sabbath-worshipping classic rock on the opening title track, and mellower influences like Cat Stevens, Steve Miller and even the Velvet Underground seep into Fournier-penned tunes like “Stuck In The Yard.”
Half of Heaven, which took two years to complete, was shelved due to over-experimenting. The band had to mow its sound engineer’s lawn just to pay him for his time, so FayRoy pivoted towards self-sufficiency this time around; the bulk of Oh No, Oh Man was recorded at Fournier’s Roser Park house before Dave Hanson of Orlando band Dog Island mixed it. Charnock, 29, mastered the album at his home studio, Old Familiar Sound.
Oh No, Oh Man still wears much of the cinematic flourish from past FayRoy albums — especially during Fournier’s organ solo on “Valleys and Peaks,” which sounds like it came right out of a Wes Anderson film — but the five-track effort shines especially bright when Hoag candidly sings about growing up on “Make It Out Alive,” which is a song about watching friends settle down into relationships on the way to finding the general direction that their lives will take.
“It’s about seeing the balance and beauty of the ones taking a more conservative route of buying a home in their childhood town, starting a young family, and being truly happy and content in their space,” Hoag said. “But also seeing the other side, the ones who trying to take over the world together and live the most fulfilling life together that they can. It’s about love in all of its forms and finding the balance.”
And how’s Hoag finding that balance in his life? Just listen to him be even more vulnerable on “Don’t Let me Down,” which is about his girlfriend.
“That song is about being in the throes of a relationship with someone you love. Giving all your emotions to them and saying, ‘Hey, I’m in deep here. Don’t let me down,’” Hoag explained.
“It goes on both sides, it’s essentially just a love song for Leah. Don’t let me down.”
FayRoy has been let down before. The band was downright homeless for a month in Chicago. But Hoag and Fournier came home, reconnected with friends and found value in the scenery and scene that fostered FayRoy’s creativity in the first place. Life — as exasperating as it can be — is on the beach again, and, oh man, that’s not such a bad place to be after all.
FayRoy w/The Woolly Bushmen/Johnny Mile and the Kilometers. Fri. Aug. 24, 9 p.m. $6. Fubar, 658 Central Ave., Saint Petersburg. local.cltampa.com.
This article appears in Aug 23-30, 2018.