Fruit Bats

Fruit Bats

A River Running to Your Heart

Merge

***Eric D. Johnson rarely lingers at one location too long. As a kid growing up in the Midwest, Johnson’s family moved around a lot, but it wasn’t until he became a touring musician years later that motion became a central part of his identity. That transient lifestyle stoked an enduring reverence for the world he watched pass by through a van window. A sense of place is a unifying theme he’s revisited with Fruit Bats throughout its many lives. From the project’s origins in the late ’90s as a vehicle for Johnson’s lo-fi tinkering to the more sonically ambitious work of recent years, Fruit Bats has often showcased love songs where people and locations meld into one. It’s a loose song structure that navigates what he calls “the geography of the heart.” A River Running to Your Heart represents the fullest realization of that creative vision to date. It’s a sonically diverse effort that largely explores the importance of what it means to be home, both physically and spiritually. And while that might seem like a peculiar focus for an artist who’s constantly in motion, for Fruit Bats, home can take many forms—from the obvious to the obscure.

Fruit Bats

Sometimes A Cloud Is Just A Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits And Lost Songs (2001-2021)

Merge

***Eric D. Johnson, the creative force behind Fruit Bats, doesn’t spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. “Maybe it speaks to some Midwest thing,” he says. “Don’t be overly reflective or navel-gazing. And as a songwriter, you always want to be looking forward, not backward.” But with the 20th anniversary of his first Fruit Bats release (2001’s Echolocation) on his mind, it seemed as good a time as any to take stock of his work—and he’s doing so in the form of Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001–2021), a two-disc collection that tracks the history of Fruit Bats from its earliest days to right now. Thoughtfully compiled by Johnson himself, this set is split in two distinct halves. Set in reverse chronological order, the first disc cherry-picks from Fruit Bats’ official releases, including fanfavorites—“Humbug Mountain Song” from 2016’s Absolute Loser and “The Bottom of It” from his 2019 Merge debut Gold Past Life—alongside some of Johnson’s more personal choices like “Glass in Your Feet” from Echolocation.

Fruit Bats

The Pet Parade

Merge

***“The Pet Parade,” the title track to Fruit Bats’ newest album, might be a surprising opening track for longtime fans of Eric D. Johnson’s beloved indie folk-rock project. The six-and-a-half-minute tone poem smolders and drones over just two chords, inspired by the strange and silly community events that he saw growing up outside of Chicago, in La Grange, Illinois, in which people dressed up and showed off their pets. Decades later, The Pet Parade emerges in troubled times, living within what Johnson refers to as the beauty and absurdity of existence. While many of the songs on The Pet Parade were actually written before the pandemic, it’s impossible to disassociate the record from the times. As an example, producer Josh Kaufman (Bob Weir, The National, and Bonny Light Horseman, in which he plays with Johnson and Anaïs Mitchell) was brought in for his deep emotional touch and bandleading abilities. However, Johnson, Kaufman, and the other musicians on The Pet Parade—drummers Joe Russo and Matt Barrick (The Walkmen, Fleet Foxes), singer-songwriter Johanna Samuels, pianist Thomas Bartlett (Nico Muhly, Sufjan Stevens), and fiddler Jim Becker (Califone, Iron & Wine)—were forced to self-record their parts in bedrooms and home studios across America. Still, says Johnson, “The songs have enough intimacy that it doesn’t sound like it was made a million miles away.”

Fruit Bats

Gold Past Life

Merge

***NOW AVAILABLE ON BLACK VINYL!!!  Gold Past Life marks both a”).n end and a beginning. It’s the end of an unintentional thematic trilogy of records that began with 2014’s EDJ (a solo record by name, but a FRUIT BATS release in spirit) and hit a peak with 2016’s Absolute Loser. They encompassed years of loss, displacement, and the persistent, low-level anxiety of the current political climate. They were written in the wake of friends who left these earthly confines and families that could have been. But these salves, these songs on Gold Past Life, also represent new beginnings—the journeys that await after making it through troubled times. In fact, the notion of getting in a van to move on—literally and metaphorically—is exactly what Gold Past Life is all about. It’s about rejecting notions of idealized nostalgia (“Gold Past Life”) and the process of grounding oneself in the present, both geographically (“A Lingering Love,” “Ocean”) and spiritually (“Drawn Away").