Eric Nally is starting to like the idea of not wearing shoes.
“There’s some kind of energy from the earth that just makes me feel recharged,” Nally says from Cincinnati, where he’s lived almost his entire life.
He’s backlit in a soft purple glow in his home studio, with a couple of pillar candles sitting by the soundboard.
It’s ironic, then, that his band name, Foxy Shazam, was inspired by a common compliment his peers would say about someone’s cool shoes back in high school: “Those are foxy shazams.”
The band has had quite the year so far. Not only did they release their ninth album, Animality Opera, in January and embarked on their very successful Rockin’ Rolla Coast Tour in the spring, but director James Gunn has twice used one of the group’s songs for his HBO Max show Peacemaker, this time in the opening credits. Gunn, who has called Foxy Shazam “objectively the greatest rock ‘n roll band in the world,” also enlisted Nally to co-write the song, “The Mighty Crabjoys Theme,” for this summer’s Superman film, which features the band playing behind actress and singer Lou Lou Safran’s lead vocals. Now, as of October 6, Foxy Shazam has a new album, Box of Magic.
Nally wears his shoulder-length, dark brown hair parted down the middle, a handlebar moustache and a soul patch complementing it. He’s much more soft-spoken and timid than I’d imagined, considering the high-energy theatricality of the band’s live shows. He compares the duality of these personalities to flicking a switch.
“I only see the stage and the lights, and I have this freedom to express myself in the moment, kind of pick up on whatever comes and be able to emotionally improvise and not hold myself back,” he says. “There’s something about that energy that comes on stage physically that I want to imbue the music with, I want to imbue the videos with, and my wardrobe and my everything and just kind of embody that thing that I’ve always known I’ve had. When I let it loose, people smile and people forget everything, and they’re like, ‘What is going on? Is this happening?’ And I love that.”
Foxy Shazam is a band synonymous with its genre-defying music, a mix of glam rock, funk, and soul. But when the band formed in 1997, they started off as a nu-metal band under the name Train of Thought.
Nally says it was Green Day that made him want to be in a band.
“When I got Dookie, that was one of my first records,” he says. “That’s kind of where I was like, ‘Man, this is really what I want to do.”
It was Tom Waits, however, that pushed Nally into a different musical direction.
“When I discovered Tom Waits and what he stood for, and how he exists in his own beautiful way, that he just does what he does, that was really inspiring to me,” he says. “And got me, like, really appreciating and being confident in my own strangeness.”
In 2004, the group changed its name and adopted the sound they’re known for today, releasing their debut album, The Flamingo Trigger, in 2005 and touring for the next two years. After releasing three more albums—Introducing Foxy Shazam (2008), Foxy Shazam (2010), and The Church of Rock and Roll (2012)—with three different labels, the band put out 2014’s Gonzo independently, before taking a five-year hiatus.
Nally says that it was a combination of events that led to the band’s years-long break.
“It was a little bit of changing all of these labels throughout our career and making records that suffered from the changing of all the labels,” he says. “The business side of our band was always changing.”
It was with Gonzo that the members of Foxy Shazam felt like they really came into their own.
“We just basically wrote the record ourselves and really dug deep inside personally about some things that we had never done before,” he says. “And that was the first time in our career where we just really embraced who we were.”
But making that record independently, along with constant touring, took a toll on the band.
“I think towards the end, we really went hard with Gonzo and did it all on our own,” he says. “It was amazing and it felt really good. We didn’t really take a break on a bad note. We were like, ‘Oh, that was awesome. Now, let’s assess where we’re at now. Let’s take some time to be apart and be inspired by other things, and recharge in our own ways.”
Nally describes it as a creative decision to come back together when the time was right.
During the band’s hiatus, Nally worked with hip-hop duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis on their lead single, “Downtown,” from their album, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, and toured with them for about two and a half years.
“Magically, out of nowhere, Macklemore calls me and, all of a sudden, I’m flying with him to Europe,” he says. “And I got to experience that whole thing on that level, which Foxy had never really got to do. To be able to experience that somehow was just really cool and powerful.”
In 2020, the band announced on social media they were getting back together, then released a sixth album, Burn, on its own label, Cincinnati-based Eeeoooah, in December of that year. “We’ve been back at it ever since,” he says.
The band has remained independent and prolific, releasing four subsequent albums in four years. Box of Magic is an optimistic, dance-a-thon of a record filled with lush orchestrations and soaring vocals, recorded at the legendary EastWest Studios in Los Angeles, where artists such as Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, and the Mamas and the Papas recorded some of their biggest hits.
“The live room we were recording in was right next to the live room that they did Pet Sounds in, and the piano that Brian Wilson played for all those songs was still there,” says Nally. “And I snuck in there after a session and nobody was in there, and I sat at the piano. I know you’re not supposed to touch it, so I didn’t. I respected that, but I put my hands barely on the keys, and I just felt this overwhelming sense of, the best thing I can say or describe it as, is, gratitude. It felt like the ghosts of rock and roll past were all there. So, that’s Box of Magic for me, man.”
Nally tells me that though all of the songs on this album hold a special place in his heart, the record’s fifth track, “Just Lovin’ This Life,” is one that stands out for him, partly because Grammy- and Emmy Award-winning songwriter Diane Warren wrote the song for him after hearing “Downtown.”
“She sent it to me and she was like, ‘If you’d ever want to do this song, I wrote it for you, it’s yours,’” he says. “She was like, ‘I had to pull my car over when I heard your voice.’ I met with her and we talked about the song. It’s an amazing song. And it means a lot to me, and it signifies something to me as an artist that no matter whether it came from you, you can still inhabit it in a way and make it beautiful.”
Foxy Shazam is a band that’s flown under the radar for years, which Nally always considered a good thing, because it reminds him that he’s doing this because he loves what he does, not for the fame. But that doesn’t mean he’s not grateful for the band’s recent rise to stardom in recent years, thanks in part to the group’s contributions to Peacemaker and Superman.“James Gunn has the ability to put millions of eyes on whatever he does… Superman is an American icon,” he says. “It just all feels really awesome.”
