The midwest, particularly the part of the midwest Eric D. Johnson hails from, is a largely flat expanse. Zipping through it on the highway, you’ll see cities and towns rise up in the distance, but blink and you’ll miss other man-made rejoinders to horizontal living dotting the landscape, hill after hill, built from the refuse of the past: landfills. Some of these hills make for great sledding spots, parks, and trails. Others turn organic waste into compost. 'The Landfill' is something else entirely: a mountain dominating the landscape of Johnson’s heart.

Over the course of his now 25-year career under the Fruit Bats moniker, most of Eric D. Johnson’s output has been the product of patience and fine-tuning. His songs, to borrow a phrase, are slow growers, given life on albums that encompass long stretches of time and memory. 'Baby Man' changed that — he disallowed himself from referring to material he’d been working on before laying the album down, utilizing the morning pages technique of stream-of-consciousness, observational songwriting which flowed directly into his afternoon recording sessions. It was both a breathtaking document of Johnson’s skill as a singer-songwriter and an unvarnished account of the two weeks in which he recorded the album.

'Baby Man’s closeness to Johnson’s heart and the close attention to his voice and instrument its minimalist-maximalist ethos required uncorked something in him as he wrote towards a new full band effort. “That session was over,” he explains, “but there was way more to explore. I liked the immediacy of it, and I wanted to see how that would translate into a full-band Fruit Bats record.” Within weeks, he was back in a studio, this time with his band — David Dawda (bass), Josh Mease (guitars, synth), Frank LoCrasto (piano, synth), and Kosta Galanopoulos (drums) — with whom Johnson has spent over a decade building Fruit Bats into one of the most in-demand live acts in indie rock. Listening to 'The Landfill', it’s not hard to understand why: simply put, this band smokes.

Producing the initial recording sessions in Washington’s Bear Creek Studios, Johnson set out to capture “the sound of this band I constantly marvel at, the feeling of being in a room with musicians you love and trust enough to let them cook.” They laid most of it down on the floor — no click tracks, no comped vocals, and minimal overdubs, with frequent collaborator Thom Monahan returning to provide additional production and 'The Landfill’s final mix. “It’s how we do things with my other band, Bonny Light Horseman, and I was curious to see how it would work with Fruit Bats,” Johnson notes. “It’s both a very personal record, and my most collaborative to date.”

It’s also the most live a Fruit Bats record has been since 2009’s 'The Ruminant Band', and in paring back the number of tracks that typically layer a full-band song, the psychedelic, technicolor dreaminess of their sound is more vivid than ever. Time and space melt into the sublime as the band gels around Johnson’s hazy croon on 'That Goddamn Sun', stretching out to accommodate him as he trips from California to North Carolina. In striking a balance between ecstatic romance and melancholia, 'Think Aboutcha' occupies the blissful-but-doomed intersection of the E Street Band and Paul McCartney, playful but playing for stakes that are larger than life, while 'Perhaps We’re a Storm' charges headlong into the unknown.

All of these songs — most of the songs on 'The Landfill', in fact — mark themselves immediately as some of the best in Eric D. Johnson’s ever-expanding songbook, seekers and anthems alike. It’s the most daunting peak he’s scaled yet, musically or lyrically: a swashbuckling set of full-band jammers couldn’t be more honest and open-hearted about his hopes and anxieties, his dreams and failures, what’s passed and what will come to pass, were it just him, his guitar, and the listener.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Saddest Part of the Song
2. All Wounds
3. Think Aboutcha
4. That Goddamn Sun
5. Silverfish in the Sink
6. Wild Pony Tower Moment
7. Fishin’ for a Vision
8. Perhaps We’re a Storm
9. Hummingbird Sage
10. The Landfill

'Baby Man', the new album by Fruit Bats, is like nothing else in Grammy-nominated songwriter Eric D. Johnson’s catalog. Little in the arc of his career—including Fruit Bats’ evolution from home recording project to rollicking roadshow, his solo output, and his work with Bonny Light Horseman—points the way to this album, in which his only accompaniment, aside from the occasional blush of synthesizer, is a guitar, banjo, or piano. Save for producer Thom Monahan, reuniting with Johnson for the first time since Fruit Bats’ 2019 breakthrough 'Gold Past Life', it’s just Johnson in the room, meaning that when the turntable’s needle meets 'Baby Man’s groove, it’s just him and the listener, mutually in for a reckoning.

Monahan’s return to the booth was vital: having mapped the outer limits of Eric D. Johnson’s musical imagination, nobody was better equipped for the deepest trip yet into his soul. 'Baby Man' is an intimate album, but rather than deliver a stripped-down or back-to-basics approach to the Fruit Bats sound, its introspection is rendered at epic scale. “It’s minimalist-maximalism,” Johnson says of his and Monahan’s approach. “There are fewer tracks on each song four or five at most compared to recent albums where there’d maybe be five tracks on a song just for synths—but this is me at my most hi-fi.” What he and Monahan do to striking effect on 'Baby Man' is explore the full power and range of his voice. Pushed forward in the mix, Johnson’s vocals—a showstopping element of his craft— have new purpose and depth on 'Baby Man', breathing life into some of the rawest songs he’s ever written into being, actively finding the heart in the lyrics sometimes just hours after they’d been penned. A text sent to Monahan one morning—“I’m just trying to write a couple more songs”—later becomes the first line of 'Puddle Jumper', a finger-picked heartbreaker whose only competition for the crown of Most Emotionally Devastating Fruit Bats Song is the other eight Johnson originals on this album. There are no Fruit Bats albums like 'Baby Man'. None until this point have demanded this kind of attention. It’s a linchpin in Johnson’s career, one that not only opens Fruit Bats up to a thrilling future but recontextualizes his past, arguing that he is one of his generation’s great singer-songwriters and will be for some time to come.

TRACK LISTING

1. Let You People Down
2. Two Thousand Four
3. Stuck In My Head Again
4. Baby Man
5. Creature From The Wild
6. Puddle Jumper
7. First Girl I Loved
8. Moon’s Too Bright
9. Building A Cathedral
10. Year Of The Crow

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." "The songs exist in a world that you can sort of travel from one to another," says Johnson. "There are roads and rivers between these songs."

Those pathways extend straight through the newest Fruit Bats album, aptly titled A River Running to Your Heart. Self-produced by Johnson—a first for Fruit Bats—with Jeremy Harris at Panoramic House just north of San Francisco, it's Fruit Bats' tenth full-length release and one that finds the project in the middle of a creative resurgence. After two decades of making music, hard-earned emotional maturity has seeped into Johnson's songs, resulting in a more complex sound that's connected with audiences like no other previous version of Fruit Bats.

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. Lead single "Rushin' River Valley" is a self-propelled love song written about Johnson's wife that clings to the borrowed imagery of the place where she grew up in northern California. Then, there's the gentle and unfussy acoustic ballad "We Used to Live Here," which looks back to a time of youthful promise and cheap rent. But the wistful "It All Comes Back" is perhaps the most stunning and surprising track on the album, Johnson's production skills on full display. Built upon intricate layers of synths, keyboards, and guitars, it's a pitch-perfect blend of tone and lyricism that taps into our shared apprehensions and hopes for a post-pandemic life. "We lost some time / But we can make it back / Let's take it easy on ourselves, okay?" sings a world-weary but ultimately reassuring Johnson in the song's opening lines. It's the kind of performance that makes you hope Fruit Bats stays in this one place, at least for a little while longer. 

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A.
1. Dim North Star
2. Rushin’ River Valley
3. See The World By Night
4. Tacoma
5. Waking Up In Los Angeles
6. We Used To Live Here
SIDE B.
7. It All Comes Back
8. Sick Of This Feeling
9. The Deep Well
10. Meridian
11. Jesus Tap Dancing Christ (It’s Good To Be Home)