There’s a strong case to be made that Robert Francis isn’t the kind to turn tail and slink away after things have gotten a little hairy. Take, for example, what the L.A.–based musician is up to when the Georgia Straight reaches him in a California seaside parking lot.

“We’re driving to San Diego to play a show, so we thought that we’d stop and do a bit of surfing,” the easygoing singer-songwriter reveals.

What’s impressive about Francis hitting the waves on this day is that he’s well aware that surfing in California can be, well, terrifying.

“The shark thing, for example, is real—I’ve seen one, and it was a really awful thing,” he says. “It was very close, and it was a great white. There’s a beach called El Porto where a guy just got attacked a month ago by a great white—there are tons of them over there. What happened to me was that this guy behind me was screaming, ‘Shark! Shark! Right under you.’ I looked back, and it was right there. But here I am.”

Francis is also still here as a musician, despite going through a seriously rough patch a couple of years back. Long story short, the artist—who enjoyed early hits and soundtrack placements with songs like “Junebug” and “All of My Trains”—crashed big-time after the release of his third album, Strangers in the First Place. Looking back, the singer realizes he was pushing himself and his backing musicians too hard with a touring schedule not meant for most mortals. The band quit mid-swing. Soured on the industry, Francis followed suit, decamping to Michigan, where he hooked up with a girl he’d met on the road. From there, the boozing started, leaving him in a dark hole.

If the beginning of his latest album, Heaven, is any indicator, things got bleak. The record’s opening track, “Something Tells It Not To”, seems to be a final nod to the darkness, with Francis repeating “I’m going down, I’m going down” over ghostly violin and plaintive piano. The album isn’t without its optimistic moments, however, from the loping ’60s-sweetened pop of “See You Around” to the coffeehouse country of the title track. Elsewhere, Francis does meat-and-potatoes Americana as authentically as that guy from Asbury Park on “Love Is a Chemical” and drags the Age of Aquarius to roots-rock heaven for “Hotter Than Our Souls”. Still, that there was a period when he got lost is something the 27-year-old doesn’t deny.

“I’ve only really ever done music,” reveals Francis, whose backing band is called the Night Tide. “I dropped out of school at 17 and cut my first record [2007’s One by One] when I was 18, and then released it and toured when I was just 19. I think what happens is that it’s easy to lose the plot when you are so close to something. You can’t step back and see it from afar anymore.

“So I started unwinding,” he continues. “I couldn’t relate to the source anymore that I was able to pull from and write my best songs from. I lost the ability to remember why I was doing this in the first place. That, mixed with a really long tour that didn’t necessarily go well, drove me to a place where I burned out and had to stop.”

The road back would start with a call to do The Tonight Show With Jay Leno in 2012.

“I didn’t stop for long,” Francis says. “I was in this place called Copper Harbor, in the most northern part of Michigan, and I really wanted to start a new life. Then I was told that, being on a record label, I was contractually obligated to do Jay Leno. I remember looking around on-stage—I had my sisters playing with me—and thinking, ‘This is not a bad life.’ ”

From the title of Heaven to the fact that he sounds as excited to be back on the road as he does about the day’s surfing excursion, there’s plenty to suggest that Francis has come around to thinking that life is indeed pretty great. Even if there are times when you’re going to find sharks in the water.

Robert Francis and the Night Tide play Electric Owl on Thursday (October 16).