Whether his preference is pastoral folk, cosmic Americana or shimmering indie pop, Eric D. Johnson has always been less interested in chasing trends than documenting the emotional terrain of everyday life. More often than not, that means a Fruits Bats song will evolve at its own patient pace before revealing something quietly profound. That approach underwent a dramatic shift with 2025’s Baby Man. Written and recorded in less than two weeks, that album abandoned years of accumulated material in favor of stream-of-consciousness prose and on-the-spot performances.
This newfound immediacy carries over to The Landfill (Merge), albeit in a full-band setting. With Baby Man producer Thom Monahan again at the helm, the LP was tracked mostly live at rural Washington State’s Bear Creek Studio with longtime bandmates David Dawda (bass), Josh Mease (guitar, keyboard), Frank LoCrasto (piano, synth) and Kosta Galanopoulos (drums). With few concessions to studio perfection, the vibe is spontaneous yet locked-in, allowing the group’s expansive warmth and melodic instincts to breathe more naturally than ever.
MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland reached out to Johnson to get the scoop on an album that adheres to all the typical Fruit Bats signposts: hope, melancholy, intimacy, grandeur, confession, collaboration. And, in doing so, it ranks among the strongest releases in a remarkably consistent catalog.
The idea of a landfill as both a monument to the past and a vantage point for the future is striking, to say the least. How did that concept crystallize into the focal point of the album?
Often when I have bigger metaphorical ideas like that, they begin with just a simple image that strikes me. The metaphor comes later. I have a bunch of old photos that I took with a Fisher-Price 110-film camera when I was a kid. They’re all pretty evocative at this point through the hazy lens of memory, you know? No matter how simple they look, there always seems to be a story inside of them. One that always stuck out to me was a picture I took of a landfill near an apartment complex I was living in when I was about 10. Growing up in the Midwest, landfills were really the only hills I’d ever seen, and they always held some sort of strange totemic energy for me. We’d sled on them in the winter and walk on them in the summer. They smelled weird. Those words—“the landfill”—always floated around in my brain, like something that might be a song someday. They had to grow into the metaphor, like a puzzle I had to solve. My (2021) album, The Pet Parade, was born in a very similar way, from one of those old pictures.
Baby Man seemed to unlock a more instinctive style of songwriting for you. What did you learn from that process that carried over into the full-band setting for this one?
Baby Man and The Landfill are most certainly twins … or even just one album, in my mind. Baby Man was written and recorded entirely in about 10 or so days’ time in February 2025. When that album was done, the songs kept coming, and they were all related to each other. As my Bonny Light Horseman bandmate Anaïs Mitchell would say, they were “talking to each other.” After the Baby Man session, I just kept writing in March and April, and we went into the studio to make The Landfill in May. It didn’t even really feel like it carried over so much. It was all just one process.
You’ve described The Landfill as both deeply personal and your most collaborative LP yet. How did those two things coexist?
There was no way that personal, direct kind of songwriting feel wasn’t going to carry over from Baby Man. But I also missed my band and wanted to capture all the things I like about playing with them. So somehow, I fused the very personal and very communal here. I trusted those guys with this stuff. As far as what I learned and carried over from the Baby Man writing process, it’s all just part of me constantly trying to let go, to hold things as loosely as possible. I’m still learning to do that.
Were there any moments where the band took songs somewhere you never would’ve imagined on your own?
The song “Fishin’ For A Vision” sticks out on a few levels. I initially wrote that one with no other arrangement in mind other than “tender ballad.” But once we played it on the floor at Bear Creek, the band took it into this strange little groove. Josh was playing a Fender Bass VI, which has a beautiful, mysterious marimba-like sound but also is taxing on the wrists to play. He needed to rest his hands, plus we were all hungry. We did one take of that song, broke for lunch, then came back and thought the take sounded pretty great. So that’s a single take, arranged, more or less, in real time. If we’d had unlimited time, we may have taken it in a different direction. But there wasn’t time to second guess.
Tracks like “Think Aboutcha” and “Perhaps We’re A Storm” balance a euphoric vibe with an uneasy feeling of impermanence. How are hope and anxiety inseparable for you as a songwriter?
I’m sometimes told my music is “comforting” in some way. I always feel like it’s riddled with anxiety—and the soothing quality people are hearing is me trying to reassure myself. So the hope and anxiety are pretty much two sides of the same coin. I’ve always liked those dichotomies in music: happy/sad, calm/anxious, tragicomic and so on.
After a quarter century of Fruit Bats albums, what keeps you chasing new emotional and musical territory?
I’ve been doing it too long to do anything else at this point. Creating things is almost like a personality disorder that’s morphed into a career path. I feel that way a lot—and I’m only slightly kidding here. I certainly keep living a life, and that’s what I’m singing about. I’ll keep doing it as long as people keep listening. And even if they stop listening, I’ll probably still keep going.
See Fruit Bats live.
