Fruit Bats - Baby Man

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.