It’s one of those experiences Utahns get to relive every couple of years or so, but Fruit Bats are heading this way again. They’ll be at The Commonwealth Room a few days from now, on Friday, October 16. Delta Spirit’s Matthew Logan Vasquez opens. Doors at 7 p.m.
Lead singer Eric D. Johnson was in the Bay area when we connected over the phone, and just before he started tackling 30+ concert dates. Lucky for us, Salt Lake City remains one of his fondest touring memories, and the band now makes a point of visiting every tour. Their first time here was in the spring of 2002, at Kilby Court. They’d arrived days after a massive snowstorm, temperatures in the 60s and mounds of white stuff all around.
“I’m pulling this out of the ether — the early tours were so hit and miss — but that was one of the best experiences I ever had, being part of The Shins’ Oh, Inverted World spring tour,” Johnson recalls. “We were best friend bands before I was in The Shins, and we became super best friends on that tour, traveling in vans, having breakfast together, staying in the same hotels.”
We spoke about what the journey’s been like ever since, tapping into how nearly 30 years as a touring musician has helped shape who he is now and where the music’s still taking him.
Q: YOU HAVE, WHAT, OVER 30 SHOWS COMING UP?
Johnson: “I have an insane amount of shows. I used to spread it out over time — do a week, take a couple weeks off — but that began to feel like I was always on tour or waiting to be on tour. Now we just do it in one big blast, kind of old school.”
Q: HAS A LOT CHANGED? WHAT’S DIFFERENT NOW THAN IT WAS 20 YEARS AGO?
Johnson: “The industry is different. It changes quicker now, and there aren’t real rules anymore. I’ve been far more prolific in the past 10 years, partly because I have to be. And I’m good at doing it now, more inspired. I hold things more lightly. In my younger years, I felt like, well, is this the last time I’m ever going to do this? And I was using every ingredient in the pantry in case it was. I felt like everything in the proverbial fridge was going to go bad, so I put it all in the soup. Now I’m a little more patient. I’m better at editing. Everything’s different.”
Q: THAT MAKES SENSE. IF I WERE TO COMPARE MOUTHFULS TO BABY MAN, THE FIRST IS A MUSICAL COLLAGE OF A LOT OF SOUNDS, WHILE THE OTHER IS MORE LIKE ONE GUY IN A ROOM WITH A GUITAR.
Johnson: “I can enter an album with simpler concepts now. I am more experienced and fearless. When I hear Mouthfuls, it sounds like a lot of ingredients and some hesitancy. It was really different then. We were coming into the indie rock boom, but I still had a late ’90s mindset. Very low stakes. You got in a van, played some shows, and hoped the weekly paper wrote about you. It was your only means of people coming to the show. It’s easy to reminisce about the simpler days. It wasn’t like I wasn’t trying, but there was a different mindset of how you tried.”
Q: LIFE IN THE PRE-ALGORITHM DAYS, RIGHT?
Johnson: “Exactly. There’s just so much noise. I’m a unique case because I was lucky enough to get in before the door closed for a lot of people. I feel fortunate that I didn’t really have a lot of success out of the gate, not like many of my peers did in the early 2000s. And I still feel lucky I got signed to Sub Pop. It was like being signed to a minor league baseball deal with them. They were in the big leagues and decided to give me a shot. It’s harder for younger artists now. They have to come screaming out of the gate, where I was allowed to lurch slowly and do a lot of learning on the job.”
Q: WAS BECOMING SO PROLIFIC ONE OF THOSE SKILLS YOU LEARNED? OR WAS IT ALWAYS PART OF YOUR NATURE TO PRODUCE LIKE CRAZY?
Johnson: “That came with confidence. I think I’m a better writer as a grown ass man. I don’t really have a breakthrough record, but I had a breakthrough single on Absolute Loser in 2011 (“Humbug Mountain Songs” has over 91 million streams). I’m not always writing about the past or about aging, but I needed a little wisdom to learn to do what I do now better.
“Because I wasn’t an emo guy, I wasn’t good at writing songs about how my girlfriend left me. The big bands in the 2000s were doing that, while I was writing about dinosaurs. I wasn’t really tapped into my feelings then. I needed a little life, and it gave me more material to work with. Now I don’t have to use all the ingredients. I spread myself out.”
Q: IT MAKES ME THINK OF HOW BLUES MUSICIANS ARE MORE REVERED THE OLDER THEY GET. ONCE THEY’VE ACQUIRED EXPERIENCE, THEY FEEL MORE BELIEVABLE TO US.
Johnson: “Think about ‘Both Sides Now’ by Joni Mitchell. She was 23 when she wrote that. And the first Jackson Browne record, he was writing those songs at that same age. You can do it when you’re in your 20s, but you’re often playing a character. You’re projecting. I wasn’t ready to play the character yet. I needed to [learn how to] be the real guy first.”
Q: DO YOU BLEND THE FICTION WITH NONFICTION IN YOUR MUSIC?
Johnson: “The last couple records are definitely nonfiction. I tried to be a fiction writer with Tripper. I decided I’d write stories about people. That was the loose concept, and I’m proud of it. I feel like those songs have not connected with audiences as much. When I do get more personal, shrouded in a little bit of mystery, they like that and so do I.”
Q: YOU HAVE FRUIT BATS, SONGS UNDER YOUR OWN NAME, BONNIE LIGHT HORSEMAN. HOW DO YOU DISCERN WHAT SONGS BELONG IN WHICH PILE?
Johnson: “It doesn’t matter. Bonnie is so collaborative that we write everything together every time. If someone brings something in, they have to be willing to dismantle it. We have a process where anything goes. And I have taken that into Fruit Bats a little bit. Even though I’m writing by myself, I’m not very precious about it. I’ve become good at editing.”
Q: HOW DID BEING PART OF THE SHINS HELP SHAPE YOU?
Johnson: “It’s one of the most pivotal moments of my life, joining that band. I’d been struggling with Fruit Bats, and became a hired gun with them for a few years, but it was at the height of their fame. There was no turning back for me at that point. I was seeing and meeting the world and having bucket list experiences. If you’re a songwriter, you can be a multi-instrumentalist and join another band and play their songs. You climb inside the songs. James [Mercer] was unlike me. He was a peer who came screaming out of the gates with powerful songs. It was more ambitious than I was used to, and it showed me how I should be doing it.”
Q: OR EVEN ANOTHER WAY OF HOW IT COULD BE DONE, RIGHT?
Johnson: “Exactly. From a lifestyle experience, the sound of walking out onto a stage that size, with all those people cheering, I wanted to know how I could get that. It changed me from having a small indie rock outlook to imagining something much larger. I’m still a very Midwestern modest person, and I’m happy to be here. I didn’t need to be a rock star. But it was an experience I couldn’t go back from. It gave me more fire moving forward.”
Q: DO YOU HAVE ANY MUSICAL BOXES LEFT TO CHECK?
Johnson: “I have one I can’t talk about, because it’s a secret work in progress. But, yes, there is one. There are other odd projects, stuff that’d be fun to work on. My ambitions are to do things that are weirder and likely alienating to my current fan base, but I do want to keep going.”
Q: IT WASN’T WEIRD REALLY, BUT I REMEMBER WHEN YOU RE-RECORDED THE SMASHING PUMPKINS’ 1993 ALBUM, SIAMESE DREAM. WAS THAT A COVID THING?
Johnson: “That was as COVID as it gets. And another strangely huge learning experience (in a really good way). I was tasked to do that for a series that does full album covers, a small budget type thing. If you could record at home, it was a perfect pandemic project. The idea was to not work too hard on it because it was such a weird thing, and I ended up making an opus in a really beautiful way. Maybe no one would be interested, but it got to be the most obscure thing I’d done. It was a modest hit for whatever reason. Maybe people needed the distraction. It was a great lesson of doing it for myself and holding no expectations at all. It worked out. People still shout out Smashing Pumpkin cover requests at shows, and we still sometimes do them.”
Q: EVER GET A BILLY CORGAN REACTION?
Johnson: “No, I’ve never heard anything from Billy.”
Q: WHICH IS SURPRISING BECAUSE HE’S A GUY THAT CAN’T STOP TALKING.
Johnson: “It must be too low profile for him to have noticed, but in my tiny world of music fans, people like that one.”
Q: DO THE PUMPKINS GET TO COUNT AS ONE OF YOUR INFLUENCES?
Johnson: “Probably not a bedrock influence that can be heard, but I was a suburban Chicago teenager when those records came out. They were our band, you know, and we were proud of them.”
Q: WHAT OTHER BANDS MADE YOU WANT TO GET INTO MUSIC?
Johnson: “You know, I was trying to sound like Tears for Fears more than anything at first. Sometimes Fruit Bats is called an Americana band, but it’s more Tears For Fears in some ways. They’re a band that got inside me at a tender age. I loved the Grateful Dead, too, but rather than swinging me into jam music, that love swung me into real California West Coast country sounds, like the Byrds’ country era, and Graham Parsons. They were huge for me, as was Fairport Convention. And when I was in high school learning how to be in a band, learning the Beatles’ music was a textbook for how to do just that. You could go into those records, and it was like taking a graduate course in songwriting. Indie rock was big for me too. In the mid ’90s, I was this ex-Deadhead who didn’t know how to play a guitar solo. Then I heard Pavement and Guided By Voices, and I knew I could do that.”
Q: I’VE EVEN HEARD YOUR BAND DESCRIBED AS DISCOESQUE ON OCCASION. MAYBE BECAUSE YOU CAN HIT THE HIGH BEE GEES NOTES?
Johnson: “I do like disco. I really like the Bee Gees and even ABBA, which was an earlier influence I didn’t even know I had, from the time I was a young kid. That was the music that was on the radio before I could even turn the dial. It was just on. There’s definitely an undercurrent of AM Gold and 1970s — especially on Gold Past Life — of AM Gold and 1970s, even touching on Bread and Seals and Crofts, bands my parents listened to. It’s all lodged in my brain.”
Q: LISTENING TO BABY MAN, I WAS SO IMPRESSED WITH “FIRST GIRL I LOVED,” WHICH WAS WRITTEN BY SOMEBODY ELSE IN 1967: THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND.
Johnson: “I’d wanted to cover that song for so long and didn’t know how or where. That whole album was written and recorded within about 10 days. I needed it to be very immediate. I wasn’t allowing myself to go back to a sketch from two years ago. That Incredible String Band cover happened to fit with that record, kind of a little scene change.”
Q: SUCH A GORGEOUS COVER.
Johnson: “There was a Judy Collins version called ‘First Boy I Loved’ and my song references her version as well. So it’s kind of a cover of a cover.”
Q: FROM A FRIEND: WILL BONNIE LIGHT HORSEMAN PLEASE PLAY SALT LAKE CITY SOON?
Johnson: “We played Park City in 2022, but I don’t think Bonnie’s ever played in Salt Lake, which is strange. On the other hand, Fruit Bats have played Salt Lake City a-million times. We hit it every tour, and it’s always a great stop, one of my favorites, ever since we played Kilby Court in 2002.”
Q: THEY NEED TO ADD THE FRUIT BATS TO THE KILBY BLOCK PARTY IN 2027. THE NEXT NATURAL STEP, RIGHT?
Johnson: “I’d love to, yeah. I’d love to.”
The future’s unwritten. In the meantime, catch Fruit Bats this Friday. Get your tickets.
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