Interview: Fruit Bats

The last time we got the chance to talk with you back in 2006 we discussed how at that time you felt like Fruit Bats was basically your solo project with other people having come in and out of it, despite your wanting it to be more of a solid band. Do you feel like you've got that solid band with Fruit Bats that you've always wanted now? Eric Johnson: Definitely. It was a pretty floating cast of characters for a long time there. It was almost never the same two tours in a row, and yeah, we're coming up on two years with this band, and we're so much different from then, that I almost wanted to change the name of the band, and The Ruminant Band was actually the idea for the band name. We ended up keeping the name and naming the record that. So the record title has kind of a double-meaning in that it is a new band. It's hard when I'd been doing it myself since like the mid-'90s basically, and really ten years in earnest as of this year, to just [keep the name], but it's been easy. Everybody's into it and everybody's putting their own energy into it, and it's super cool. The touring's been going really well – really, for the first time. We're actually making money on the road and people are coming to see us and all that. Whether or not that was just like serendipitous that it worked out that way or if it's because of that, we'll never know, but, yeah, it's been great.

When did you know things were coming together as a full band? Did things feel different right from the start with this lineup? I put it together in a much different way than I had in the past put together previous bands. Previous bands were really sort of patchwork things where I'd fly different people in from different places and be like, 'Let's go on tour! We have no other choice; this is just who it's going to be!' It's not like there weren't great musicians in those lineups or anything, it was often just pretty haphazard and I found myself never having enough time. It wasn't so much about how I couldn't find good people; it was more about how I couldn't find time. I mean developing things on the road is totally fine, but if it's not right from the get-go, by the end it sounds good, but it's not what it is. This way I had a little bit of time, I had nothing planned, it's two of the people who have been in the band for a while now, Chris, the bass player, who's from Michigan, he's been with me longer than anybody else, since the second record [and keyboardist Ron Lewis]. But, yeah, it was really the addition of these two guys from Chicago that I really wanted to be, like, the lynchpin guys. I really wanted kind of a groovy, Levontone drummer and I knew of a guy in Chicago who could do that who's also a producer [Graeme Gibson] and wanted more of a traditional-like lead guitarist and he knew of [Sam Wagster] who was more like that. So that's how the band came together, but it was much more of a curated approach than before. I was like, 'I'm going to put these people together each with a role that I think suits them and when we get together for rehearsals, not to prepare for a show or a tour, if we get together and it works, we'll sort of go from there.' And it worked, and we actually did a tour of the West Coast. We didn't have anything out, so I thought we'd just do a tour out there to sort of friendly audiences – because we have the most fans out there – and see what happens. So that was how the record came together. We actually worked on a lot of the songs on the record on that tour that we did, which was a year ago January.

You had been sitting on some songs and stuff of your own that you'd written for Fruit Bats well before that though, right? Yeah, it was three or four years worth of stuff, like a backlog, so it was that, and there was some stuff though that really presented itself with the new people that was very much an immediate thing, where I'd just go, 'Oh, this should be a song put together by this band.' So it was a whole mix of things.

Speaking of putting together the album itself and like how you mentioned your drummer, Graeme, produced, engineered, and mixed the album. How pivotal was he and how much did his work in those roles influence the way things ended up sounding? It was great, and we've always had good people record our stuff. Brian Beck, he always played on our [previous] records and produced them, but it was really cool having someone produce our record who was going to really be there, you know, for the rest of the time, not just be there for the recording and then see us off. So yeah, I think he did it with a lot of care. And because it was sort of an in-house production like that, you could really take the time with it too. Obviously, we paid Graeme and everything, but the clock wasn't running and we were sort of able to be thoughtful with it and take some different approaches, and yeah, it was a really cool experience.

Reading other interviews that you've done about The Ruminant Band, you've frequently mentioned how you barely played on the album. What did it mean to you to be able to give up that kind of control and let the other guys do what they do? It was great. If you told me that beforehand, that I don't want you to play anything, it would've totally freaked me out, but as it was happening it was great. I felt really liberated. Obviously, I sang everything and I played here and there plenty, but, like, on the previous records I would play the majority of everything; where I would play ninety percent of everything on the previous records, I probably played ten percent of everything on this one, so it was sort of an inverse thing. But it was really cool, not that I questioned my skills or anything; I just liked the way those guys played and it was cool putting some things in someone else's hands and seeing how it comes out.

On the Sub Pop site, and in a lot of reviews I've read, people seem to focus a lot on the sunniness of the sounds on the new album, yet, perhaps because I'm from Michigan, I can't help but get caught by your lyrical references to coldness and snow, like on 'Singing Joy To the World' or breathing frosty air on 'Beautiful Morning Light.' Do you like that sort of natural stylistic juxtaposition of a sunny day that's still freezing cold, not unlike the kind of days we get here in Michigan in the late winter? Sure. [Laughs] It's more far-reaching than that. There's definitely a lot of Midwestern-ness in the way I write, and I think in particular I've been living out on the West Coast now for pretty much, I think it's been about five years, and then with on and off, it's been a little bit longer than that, so about six years, and this was really the first batch of songs that I wrote as a West Coast person. And I used to, when I was a Chicago guy, I would write all these songs about the mountains and nature, and whatever, and I sort of went in the opposite direction this time and was singing about, like the Rust Belt and I was singing about cold stuff and factories and things like that. So yeah, I think as soon as I got out here I stopped writing about out here and now I'm wanting to sort of write more about the Midwest and think about that.

When we talked last, we discussed how you wanted your last album, [2005's] Spelled In Bones, to be a bummer record and then things didn't really turn out that way. Did you have an intention like that with The Ruminant Band in terms of the mood? It was really just a backlog [of songs]. I've never been super conceptual in the ways I want to approach things, and it's not like I ever set up rules for myself in the past, I just wanted it to be a little diary, a little collection of things. I think a lot of great records are that. They don't really have like a specific crux; they're just drawn together in a way. I'm just going to write what comes out and if I like the song, it's going to stay. So yeah, it's highly low-concept. And low-concept is not cool right now either, but I don't care. But I'm not someone who thinks of some huge theme. It's just my songs and hopefully people like them. I think some people do!

A lot of people have described the sound of your new lineup, and the new album, as having more of a '70s rock vibe. Do you feel like that's a fair place to start? Sure, yeah. If somebody asks, I'll sort of reference that. I think ultimately you write for yourself. Most people do, at least, maybe not everybody, maybe if you're on American Idol or something you don't, you probably don't write at all if you're on that show, but I think ultimately you want to look out at your shows and see a crowd of yourself at your shows. [Laughs] And not that I mean that, like, literally where I want to see a bunch of thirty-four-year-old dudes; I think it's more like I would sing to you if I write something you yourself might want to hear, and that's what I do. If people who are like-minded are liking my music, it makes me happy because that means I've succeeded. But I think we have a pretty large span of fans too. The fan base, particularly on the West Coast where we have sort of the biggest following, it's getting a lot, lot younger. The last tour we did was all all-ages shows, and even at some of the shows we had like junior high-aged kids coming to the shows and stuff, which was amazing, and I'm thinking probably The Shins connection doesn't hurt there, but yeah. Those kids have no connection to '70s rock or anything. They were born in the '90s! So, yeah, I guess college kids now were born in the '90s and kids who can drink were almost born in the '90s now, but yeah, there are a lot of kids who have no context for that. There's a whole like weird second and third generation of things that I don't mind. If somebody gets into us because they like Fleet Foxes, that makes me happy. I think the Fleet Foxes are great. We get a lot of kids who have heard of us because of the Fleet Foxes, and I'm like, 'That's cool.' It doesn't really matter. If your enjoyment of it is pure, I don't really care what angle you're coming in from.

Since you joined The Shins a couple years back and have toured with Vetiver, how do you think continuing to have those experiences as a sideman have influenced you or helped you develop as a musician? All of that helps. It's all part of your life experience and it would be a ridiculous notion for me to say it hasn't affected me at all and I've shut my ears to it. That's ridiculous. I've always really enjoyed playing and I don't think there are tons of sidemen guys like me who have also hit it as hard or put as much into their own projects too. I think you can sort of get caught up in doing the side thing, which is way easier, just on a day to day level, it's just easier. Obviously, The Shins is easier because it's a very successful band and it's certainly a really good paycheck for me, but even in other bands like Vetiver and stuff it's just kind of nice because you can just sit back. But with the Fruit Bats, the highs are your highs and the lows are your lows, whereas everybody else is on sort of an intermediary ride. So as far as taking things from those other bands, musically and otherwise, of course, it's going to sink in. If you're playing somebody else's songs every night for weeks on end it sneaks in there. Like with The Shins we'd always drawn a lot of comparisons even before I joined that band, but I think that a lot of bands get compared to The Shins, and I've realized that in the sort of modern indie rock context, sounding like The Shins just means that you have guitars and you sing melodiously, because I think The Shins were sort of an anomalous band when they came out and they still are. That whole low concept thing I was talking about, they're the flag-wavers of the low-concept. [Laughs] Because I was always like, 'Wow, we get compared to them a lot,' and [Shins vocalist] James [Mercer] and I have similar sounding voices; that's why we sing well together...

But the validity of that comparison stops there? That keeps happening so much. And other bands that I know or have been in will get that too, [bands] who are even less like The Shins, and I realize that it's just a lazy comparison. It just means you have sort of a standard lineup, just because so many indie bands have like twelve members, like four accordion players and just a guy who plays a rack of tambourines. Not that I have anything against that. But in the big picture of the indie world, supposedly, you either sound like The Shins or you sound like The Arcade Fire, that's it. Never the 'tween shall mix. [Laughs] It's either one or the other. So I guess we would fall into The Shins category.

How do you balance your role with The Shins when you come back to doing stuff with Fruit Bats? I don't know. I finished up The Shins and then I had just been working with the Fruit Bats, and then we had a small Shins tour last year that was kind of like a quickie, but they're incomparable to one another. It's never been like a horrible shock to the system or anything. They really are very, very different and yeah, it's never like when I come back to the Fruit Bats that I'm like, 'Man, this sucks! We don't have any deli trays!' [Laughs] It's different and I get something different out of both things, and Fruit Bats is more of an emotional rollercoaster for me, because it's me trying to go out there and tell my story. It's been met with sort of mixed success, and thereby forcing me to sort of fend for myself, whereas The Shins is a great trip. So yeah, it's really incomparable to one another.

What do you think you'll be doing next? Do you have plans or ideas in the works for the next Fruit Bats album already? Yeah. I'm actually starting to work on some new stuff and we'd like to do something this year, maybe like just an EP or something. But we're planning on just continuing on touring. We're doing some of the summer festivals in the U.S., so we're still going. For the foreseeable future, we're still chugging along. There're no big plans or anything, just the standard plan of yeah, we're still going to be out there.

Fruit Bats will play The Strutt in Kalamazoo March 5. The Ruminant Band is in stores and online now. For more, visit fruitbatsmusic.com.