Eric D. Johnson’s easy chemistry with producer Thom Monahan (Pernice Brothers, Devendra Banhart) has already led to great things in the form 2019’s Gold Past Life, Fruit Bats’ winsomely melodic Merge debut. On the new Baby Man, the two reunite to craft something altogether different. It’s basically a Johnson solo album—keeping in mind, of course, that he’s always been the motor that drives Fruits Bats to begin with. What’s your getting with Baby Man is an unadulterated portrait of an artist at the top of his game, alone with his thoughts, a few instruments and heaps of knee-jerk inspiration. Johnson’s singing has never sounded more vulnerable and alive, and the music—stripped back, disarmingly real and achingly beautiful—matches the revelatory mood.
Johnson takes us through Baby Man track by track.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Let You People Down”
“I was proud this song turned out to be exactly two minutes on the nose. It makes for an ever-so-tidy quick mission statement for the album, about wanting to please and be pleased. Maybe it’s also a preemptive statement about how this album isn’t going to be filled with the country disco bops that Fruit Bats fans are used to. That said, I still believe the whole album is aimed directly at your chest with my emotional laser. Hopefully, this two minutes gets you steadied for the rest—a bunch of songs about dogs, birds, airplanes, moons, hearts and God.”
2) “Two Thousand Four”
“‘Trying to be a big man or something’” is a line from this song—and that’s probably a thing somebody told me derisively when I was a kid. Some of us desperately want to outgrow those britches. ‘In the year 2004, I drove out to the West Coast in my own tour van’—that’s the line that comes right before it, and it’s the first sentence of the story of my past 21 years. I may as well have been flying to the moon. The tour van was a 1997 Ford Econoline 12-passenger—a very worthy and sturdy craft. I slept in it along the way, ate lots of Taco Bell, listened to Grandaddy’s Sumday and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks on CD on repeat and hit the ‘play’ button on my grown life.”
3) “Stuck In My Head Again”
“A lot of this album is about that ol’ inner monologue and those way-too-quiet moments in the night where that unpredictable voice comes whispering your way. I like those words: stuck in my head. I mean them quite literally. But I also like how they evoke a notion of a song stuck in your head … like how life and the people close to us are kind of like songs we have to learn. Some of them are earworms—unforgettable, good or bad, or both at once. We end up memorizing the lyrics, the chords and the twists and turns until they loop around in our head forever.”
4) “Baby Man”
“Well, first off, there were millions of years before you or I was around. We didn’t exist during the Ice Age or the Roman Empire or the Civil War, nor could anyone then predict that we’d ever exist. Then things happened … miracles, really. And suddenly, for a brief time, we were bobbing around in the womb. For a few years after that, we were babbling innocents, and everything was magic. This song is about the loss of innocence and the desire to go back to the egg. You could either look at this song in some sort of Buddhist way or, if you prefer, like some stoners around a campfire contemplating the universe.”
5) “Creature From The Wild”
“I lost my dog in early 2025—this song is about him. He was a wild animal when we got him. He’d lived on the streets of Baja, Calif., and probably ate garbage, fish guts and carrion and lived off the kindness of strangers. But maybe he also took a kick to ribs every now and again. When we got him, he didn’t know anything about the civilized world. And yet he was this yearning and wise little gentleman. When I was first getting to know him, I naturally got really fascinated by dogs and studied up on them. Their culture and language and social structures are so similar to ours. That’s why the original jackals and wolves and prehistoric dingoes started hanging around the early man’s fire. They were like, ‘I get you, man.’ They really are our best friends. The biggest tragedy of it all: We raise them like they’re our babies, but we generally outlive them fourfold. It’s not fair.”
6) “Puddle Jumper”
“I wrote this whole album concurrently while recording it—in about 10 days’ time. There are a few songs where the first line is simply something I said aloud: ‘I’m just trying to write a couple more songs.’ Being a person who writes and records and sings songs for a living is very strange; it’s not normal. I’m not complaining. I really, really love it, and I’m really, really lucky. But it’s not normal. Sometimes it feels like you’re looking at the world out the window of a bus that’s going very fast—and the window is tinted and you can’t open it.”
7) “First Girl I Loved”
“This is an Incredible String Band cover song. Judy Collins also made a lovely version of it at some point. Why did I put a cover in the middle of this highly personal record? The album the original version was on, The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion, knocked me flat when I first heard it in the mid 2000s. I was in my 20s and trying to write songs and was taking all the influences in and trying to filter them back out into something that felt like me. This cover is sort of a flashback to that—and the extra layer is that the original song itself is also a deeply nostalgic flashback. So this is a flashback of a flashback of a flashback. And maybe it’s me telling you my story with someone else’s words.”
8) “Moon’s Too Bright”
“I wrote this and ‘Creature From The Wild’ in the same morning and recorded them both later that afternoon—and they both have dogs in them. The recording you hear is as fresh from my brain and mouth as anything I’ve ever done. The night before, I was kept awake for hours by two animals and a celestial body. One of the animals was my neighbor’s dog, who was clearly agitated by the celestial body, which was a big, bright full moon. The other animal was a mockingbird, singing an avant-garde tune all night long, mere feet from my bedroom window. Apparently, when they sing at night like that, it means they’re searching for a mate.”
9) “Building A Cathedral”
“‘Building a cathedral’ was a lovely sequence of words I heard once while getting a tarot-card reading. Back in the way olden times, these cathedrals would take generations to complete. They were designed to make you understand that God was huge and far, far above us—and that the world is intimidating and beautiful. The notion of building a cathedral is that it takes forever and is maybe never finished—but it will live on after the workers who started it are gone. In the chorus of this song, I compare the hugeness of all of this to the simplicity of love. Like, what is a ‘life’s work’ made out of, anyway?”
10) “Year Of The Crow”
“There’s a crow in my yard who I admit to sometimes talking to from time to time. I once fed him potato chips, which I quickly realized probably weren’t the healthiest snack for a crow. Although I’m sure they eat way worse things. Subsequently, I’ve tossed him the errant raw almond. He hasn’t come around much lately, and I assume he found another neighbor with better snacks. Life is filled with seasons and longing and despair. Sometimes it’s like an airplane in light turbulence with a strong headwind, and it’s taking way longer to land at the airport than you’d like.”
