The wind was uncanny. Musician Robert Francis knew fires were a feature of Southern California, but he thought a natural disaster was in the distant future.
“It’s like swimming in the ocean,” he recalls. “You know sharks are in the water.”
On January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire burned over 23,000 acres of Los Angeles County. Francis, born Robert Anthony Commagere, drove from his Sylmar home to evacuate his mother, who lived about three miles away from the flames in Brentwood. They headed to the house of his sister, Juliette Commagere, in Altadena. Then, the Eaton Fire arrived. They had to evacuate again.
Though the family’s homes remained intact, Juliette Commagere’s neighborhood was heavily hit. A layer of black soot, lead, and cyanide contaminated her house and its contents. Commagere and her husband, Joachim Cooder (Ry Cooder’s son), decided to move to the East Coast, leaving Francis with their music equipment and analog synthesizers, including a Prophet 5 and a Moog Voyager. Francis, then working on his upcoming album, Phantasmagoria, which releases March 27, introduced the instruments into his sessions.
Francis has made eight albums since the age of 19. Around 2006, he played bass behind Commagere and Cooder in a band called Vagenius, later renamed Hello Stranger. Commagere, who is also a solo artist, has had her music featured in TV shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, Drop Dead Diva, and Private Practice.
Like many Los Angeles artists, 38-year-old Francis is adapting to a new music scene, one affected by COVID-19 and the fires. Last year’s inferno wiped out recording studios and home recording equipment. For Francis, salvaged instruments have become a silver lining in the wake of disaster.
“Once you plug in an analog synth, hold one note down, and sweep an oscillator, it’s like a lonesome whistle blow,” Francis says. “You can hear all the oscillators trying to come into tune with each other. They’re alive. You can feel them.”
The music equipment Francis received was caked in black soot. He took a rag and wiped the amps and synthesizers down before getting them serviced. Some of the amps even caught fire when he turned them on. When the equipment was finally functional, a new artistic path emerged.
Before the synthesizers, Francis considered his music more ethereal. While working on the 2007 album One by One, Francis sought a live sound, reminiscent of early Bob Dylan. He made three iterations of Phantasmagoria, bringing a new approach each time. Finally, with the introduction of the analog synthesizers, everything clicked. He let go of his expectations and started playing.
“Certain ideas that I would have thrown away before,” he says, “[those] eventually turned into something serious.”
Phantasmagoria consists of 10 new songs, including the single “State Line,” which he released on March 5 with a music video. The track offers a taste of the otherworldly sound he is now exploring, beginning with a repeated melody easing into the hum of synths that evoke lasers and dissonant whirs. While his previous projects have been grounded to earth with raw instrumentation, this new record feels like launching into outer space. While his folkie, singer-songwriter structure roots the project, the synths bring out the complexities of his arrangements and vocals.
Growing up in Los Angeles, in the same Brentwood home where his mother still lives, Francis was surrounded by music. His father, Robert Francis Commagere, was a classical record producer. There are photos of Francis, around six months old, lying in his father’s lap as his dad plays the piano. His father’s music library contained tens of thousands of records and music sheets. As the fires erupted, Francis had to confront the potential destruction of his childhood home, with “blue carpet and cottage cheese ceiling,” which was the foundation of his music career, he says.
His sister and Joachim Cooder helped him decipher the L.A. music scene. Every opportunity came through them, Francis says. When he was seven, they played at the Mint with Harry Dean Stanton’s band for the actor and musician’s birthday. That night, Stanton and his guitar player invited Francis onstage to play a guitar solo on an ES-335 guitar and sing with Chaka Khan.
Francis dropped out of high school in the 11th grade and joined his sister’s band, Hello Stranger, touring at the age of 17. With a fake ID from Glenview, Illinois, he started exploring the country. By the time he was 19, he had years of experience under his belt and a strong sense of his artistry. He was inspired by Ry Cooder and his music for the film Paris, Texas and leaned into the indie aesthetic.
“In hindsight, I wonder if that identity of this brooding Springsteen type crept into my mind and I was like, Maybe I’m supposed to be that kind of writer,” he says. “Only until recently with this record, I was able to dismiss that.”
Meanwhile, the L.A. music scene he once knew has completely changed.
“A lot of us have felt after the fire that there was an old version of Los Angeles that was on its way out, and the fires finished a job that had already started,” he says. “So many of my friends who are musicians lost their houses in the fire.”
Francis’s last music project, Robert Francis + The End Times, Vol. 1, was in 2020. Since then, he experienced the pandemic, the birth of two kids, and the fires. It felt like a blur. “I needed a break from working on music to see the world the way I once saw it, which I’ve had a hard time doing for a long time,” he says.
A few days before his interview with Alta Journal, Francis took the same touring van he’d traveled in with Vagenius and drove to Dallas, Oregon, to headline a festival for the first time in years. He rediscovered the beauty in nature, one without fires.
“There’s this romanticism that I’m finding again, and I’m not sure I would have been able to see it had some of this terrible stuff not happened,” he says. “There’s this saying that your second life begins when you realize that the first doesn’t last forever.” •
Steven Vargas is an actor, a dancer, and a journalist based in Los Angeles whose work focuses on the intersections of media, social justice, and performance. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, E! News, USA Today, Dance Magazine, ARTnews, and more. He runs an independent weekly newsletter, LA Art Spot.
