Fruit Bats

Hello from in here to all you out there.

Fruit Bats’ eighth LP opens with this invocation, this call  from an isolated vocal room to your headphones somewhere  out in the world. It’s a beckoning for your trust and attention,  but also an assurance in lonely times—a distillation of  melancholy wrapped in a danceable waltz. 

“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  (The Hold Steady, 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, Muzz), 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.” 

Such tension and turmoil also impacted the lyrics of The Pet  Parade. While “Cub Pilot” and “Here For Now, For You”  began as more traditional love songs—from a personal “I” to  a specific “you”—Johnson quickly realized that these songs  needed to comfort broader audiences, changing the words to  a more inclusive “we” and “us.” So too in “The Balcony,” a  song ostensibly about a particular space in his grandmother’s  apartment, but one that evolved into a metaphor on patience. 

At times upbeat and reassuring (“Eagles Below Us”) and at  times quietly contemplative (“On the Avalon Stairs”), The Pet  Parade marks a milestone for Johnson, who celebrates 20  years of Fruit Bats in 2021. In some ways still a cult band, in  other ways a time-tested act, Fruit Bats has consistently earned  enough small victories to carve out a career in a notoriously  fickle scene. 

And Johnson himself—who has played in The Shins,  composed film scores, gone solo and returned back to the  moniker that started it all, and most recently, earned two  GRAMMY® nominations with Bonny Light Horseman— doesn’t take this long route of life’s pet parade for granted.  “I’m still really excited to make records,” he says. “Lucky and  happy and maybe happier that things went slower for me. I’m  savoring it a lot more.”