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 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. Working with Monahan in the past pushed Johnson to new sonic vistas, evidenced by a songbook of sprawling, ornately detailed crowd-pleasers. When Johnson produced Fruit Bats’ 2023 album A River Running to Your Heart, Monahan served as a sounding board, and their reunion started in a similar vein, with Johnson asking to borrow a microphone or two for a project that was just starting to take shape. One conversation led to another, and Baby Man came into being: an ambitious take on the sketchbook album where everything—lyrics and music—had to be newly written and recorded from scratch, everything he’d been cooking to that point left at the door. Every morning began with an empty page, every night concluded with a new song, sometimes two or three new songs, each of them terrifyingly beautiful.
At times it feels as if there is no horizon on Baby Man, barely a room beyond the space Eric D. Johnson occupies. Then the intensity of this gaze is broken—by a creaking chair, by a pattern thumped against a guitar, by the gentle twinkle of a synth, by a particularly gorgeous couplet—and suddenly one is grateful just to be in that space with him. 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.
Recommended Tracks: Track 1, “Let You People Down,” Track 3, “Stuck In My Head Again,” Track 5, “Creature From The Wild”
FCC Clean
Label: Merge Records
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