Fruit Bats

Johnson addressed it to Chrysalis Records, care of Huey Lewis. The pop legend never wrote back. Forty-odd years later, the mail runs the other way, since 25 years into Fruit Bats, the crowds are bigger than ever. Johnson, a self-described late bloomer, is watching it happen with the calm of someone who’s taking it all in stride.

The Landfill follows 2025's solo outing Baby Man and was cut mostly live at Washington's Bear Creek Studios with his decade-strong band (David Dawda, Josh Mease, Frank LoCrasto, and Kosta Galanopoulos). It’s adding fuel to an impressive late-career fire, and we recently caught up with Johnson to hear about the early slow burn, the current momentum, and when he’s finally going to ask Huey about a response.

Analogue: I caught the Indy show. The band sounds so good these days by the way and I loved it all, but you were losing your voice at the end. How’s it holding up in the promotion of this album?

Eric D. Johnson: Yeah, I did. It’s okay. Pretty sure I've had this happen before. It comes from upper gastric stuff basically in your sleep. I'm taking care of it. Those last few shows of that tour were rough, but I don't usually lose my voice. It would be like if you're a drummer and you lose a limb.

Analogue: But you “Armageddon’d It”.

Eric: I totally Armageddon’d It! Def Leppard was my first concert.

Analogue: Hysteria’s a great album by the way. My first concert was Huey Lewis and the News

Eric: That's my first fan letter. I just used the Chrysalis Records address, which is on the label of the actual record. I was just like ‘Chrysalis Records Hollywood California CC Huey Lewis’. I don't know; I was like seven.

Analogue: Have you ever told him that? Have you ever rubbed shoulders with Huey in any way?

Eric: No. I weirdly have a weird music industry friend, one degree of separation in common with him, that I've always been like, ‘Do I call in my Huey favor?’ Because I'd love to meet him and just tell him, ‘You never answered, dude!’

Analogue: At your show, I kept bumping into friends of mine who said, "Oh my gosh, I love Fruit Bats!’ It felt like a much bigger groundswell than I expected, like there’s been a real surge after decades of doing this. Is that completely subjective on my part?

Eric: There is. It's been in the past 10 years, but also really in the past four years. And I don't know what it is. It's not hard to talk about, but you also don't want to talk about it, because you know that by the time of this printing, it may have completely gone away, because that's how the music works. The climb was really slow—from like 2001 to 2015 or something—it was kind of slow, and sometimes there wasn't even a climb. I wasn't trudging. I was having a lot of fun being a very DIY indie rock person. So the story is not very likely, in the sense that I just never stopped, really.

Then in 2016, "Humbug Mountain Song" happened. That was just a song from that record that kind of hit for some reason, and it was really with streaming and stuff, not radio. And then Gold Past Life, that record just did really well. I feel like I finally rose to the occasion. But I was 40 when that all kind of happened. So yeah, the groundswell… It's still swelling, and I don't know. I've had so many fits and starts in my career that it's hard to know.

Analogue: Do you handle that stuff better than you did in the past?

Eric: I do remember being much younger on early tours, because I was living on the fringes of early-2000s indie rock, and those were all my friends and peers. Everyone was kind of blowing up, and I wasn’t. I was just friends with all of them, and I was sort of proud of everyone. So I wasn't jealously idling by—in fact, I was on the tours, I was opening for them, and I got signed to Sub Pop through that association. So I was reaping some benefits, but the greater audiences weren't hearing it.

I just don't think my audience was of age yet. We have some cult fans from back then, and it sounds like you and I are the same age, so you probably saw it at the show in Indy. It’s a total mix. There are some really young people. I think about myself going to Grateful Dead concerts in the early '90s, when I was like 19, and they were 50-year-olds. I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's been a slow burn. I think when people latch on, they stick around, which is very cool. I guess that's called a cult audience.

Analogue: Are you grateful for that as the trajectory?

Eric: Very, yeah. Two sides of the coin. One is, the first time I really felt things, where I was like, something is happening, was about 2022. That’s four years ago. And I do remember having a feeling of, ‘Man, I wish this had happened when I had the energy to speak to it a little bit more.’ There was not a bitterness, but the timing on it felt funny. But then the other side is, I'm actually kind of glad this is happening now, because I think physically it's harder, but mentally it might be better. I might be able to handle it a little bit better. But like I said, I have no perspective, because it's just happening. So I'm just dealing with it as it happens.

Analogue: I'm assuming in there is a testing of your mettle that maybe is the best thing for you in the long run.

Eric: At the end of the day, I don't have anyone in my family who was in the entertainment business. No one made any sort of art or anything. I'm the only person to do this. So I have no frame of reference, and truly, it sounds like a cliché, but I am truly happy to just be getting paid to do music for this long. It's insane to me. As long as I can do it, I will do it. And I have no other marketable skills.

Analogue: There's a story of some experimentation in the approach here, that coming off the solo record, you made things more immediate this time around. I'm curious how much of that is a byproduct of the longevity we've been talking about.

Eric: Yes, it is. The way I've been describing it lately is that I'm not really afraid to take risks, because I always have the notion of, I'm gonna keep doing this. There was always a little bit of a feeling of… You held things a little too tightly in the beginning, when you're working, because you're like, ‘I might never do this again. This might be my one shot.’ And it's almost the same as talking about this ‘success’, where you don't want to speak too highly of your creative skills, but if I'm doing a good job lately creatively, it's partly because I'm at a good nexus of not holding things too tightly, because I'm comfortable with where I'm at, but also having some honed skills.

I'm a bit of a late bloomer. I was just watching the George Harrison documentary last night, which came out 10 years or more ago, and I'm not comparing myself to George Harrison at all, but he had to kind of learn in real time how to write. He was a late bloomer, especially for then. And when I hear my earlier stuff, I don't think I was doing as good a job as I'm doing now. But when you're in the public eye, even in a really small way like I was back then, you still have to learn on the job. [Laughs] I don't think I'm answering this question right at all.

Analogue: [Laughs] I like where you went anyway. But I just wondered if some of it was, hey, I need something new to keep me interested.

Eric: It makes me happy when people—and this is the total perspective that you get when you have a bigger catalog, and people who are listening to you, or scrutinizing you, or doing interviews with you, can zoom out—lately people have been like, ‘You have such a wildly diverse catalog.’ That makes me so happy, because for years, people would be like, ‘Everything you do sounds the same.’

You shouldn’t ever read the reviews, but in my early days I did, and they'd be like, ‘This all sounds the same,’ and I'd be like, ‘No, it doesn't. I don't think so.’ But if you're around long enough… now I don't care if anything sounds the same. I'm writing within a world, and I'm ringing a really specific bell, and I am me. But when I zoom out, I am like, ‘Oh yeah, I am going through phases.’

This whole record lyrically is about perspective on life. Then from a musical perspective, it was the fact that I have this cool band. Right before a soundcheck, when you just plugged your instruments in, and you're just kind of messing around, I always love that moment. Speaking of holding things lightly, it's always this totally guileless moment of, we're just kind of playing. There's no audience, you're in an empty room. I kind of wanted to capture that musically a little bit with my band. Which is not to say that it's tossed off by any stretch; these are totally written and arranged songs. But it’s just something where we're holding it really lightly.

Analogue: Feeling this momentum, does that alter in any way how you think about your next musical steps?

Eric: No, not at all. I'm always thinking big and really small at the same time. I may be painfully pragmatic in a way that's maybe not good either. I always have this sort of if-all-else-fails plan. But then I also have wildly ambitious plans, too. So I think I'm always kind of ready for column A and column B to happen, and I don't know what that says exactly about my personality. I had so many fallow periods in the early years; even though it was kind of a very low plateau for many years, there were also moments of, ‘Oh my god, something's happening,’ and then other moments of being like, ‘Wow, I'm really on the verge of never doing this again.’ So I'm very tempered when it comes to that type of planning, I guess you could say.

Analogue: If there's anything I could recommend, I would make that call to Huey. You never know how long we have with him.

Eric: I know. I need to do this. You're absolutely right. So yeah, that'll be the addendum to this story‚ that Huey and I finally connected. [Laughs]

VISIT: Fruit Bats

Photo: Kelsey Gallagher