liztaylor's Posts


liztaylor's Photo Born and raised in St. Louis, I've just recently returned to my home town after a few years spent wandering around the Midwest from Milwaukee to Chicago. I enjoy listening and writing about all kinds of music, but I especially love the numerous rock subgenres including classic, indie and alt country. I also have a soft spot for past and present incarnations of eighties synth pop, but really who doesn't.

Latest Playlist


LouFest 2010 Preview: Interview with Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats

Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats

myspace.com/thefruitbats

Emerging from the dirty yet alluring morass of culture and humidity that is Chicago, Fruit Bats share a musical pedigree with their early contemporaries and collaborators such as Califone and the larger group of artists on the Perishable Records label.

Although they have been around for over a decade in various permutations, Eric D. Johnson remains the center and driving creative force of the Fruit Bats. Over the years, Johnson has been crafting a lived-in, lovingly retro blend of the swelling sounds from the golden years of rock & roll with the gentle ache of country ballads. The band is once again gaining momentum with the release of its latest album (The Ruminant Band, last year on the Sub Pop label), a turn on the summer festival circuit and a new album hopefully just around the corner. Johnson was happy to chat about the logistics of geographical shifts in musical sensibilities, the art of music education and collaboration and most importantly the Fruit Bats latest work and upcoming visit to St. Louis.

Liz Taylor: First off, how is your summer going? You guys are winding your way down the West Coast and slowly heading back towards the Midwest where you’ll make your final stop in St. Louis at LouFest.

Eric Johnson: We’ve actually been having a pretty great time. Just recently we were on Orcas Island, and the San Juan Islands. We were at Pickathon Festival, which is on like an 80-acre farm in Oregon. Yeah, we’ve just sort of been playing all of these awesome outside spaces and it’s cool that we get to end in St. Louis, which is the same deal. It’s been a lot of festivals that are not like the normal throw you on throw you off kind of festivals. It’s been really mellow and really nice. We’re almost like — I think it’s been making us play better, but sometimes we’re almost too relaxed.

Right, getting a little too much into the vacation vibe.

Exactly.

When I was listening to your music and thinking about LouFest I was thinking your music has sort of that perfect, easygoing, like it’s a really good summer soundtrack type thing. You guys seem like a really good fit for LouFest.

Yeah I’m excited. It seems like it will be a super cool festival.

Do you prefer the festival scene or is it sort of a toss up between that and playing a smaller, sort of one off night at a club?

It depends on the festival, I think. They are definitely not all the same. They can differ wildly. Yeah, we like playing outside. There’s something kind of fun about that. We’ve toured for years and years and this is literally like kind of just in the past year we’ve played more outside shows and festivals than we’ve played in the previous nine years on the road basically. And I have to say, I could definitely get used to it. It’s pretty fun especially when you don’t play at the huge festivals where you are just totally faceless. You can still have kind of an intimate time with people in an outdoor setting and especially when it’s in a pretty place. There’s just kind of this enhanced feeling. Yeah, I like it a lot, but again it’s sort of apples to oranges; you can’t really compare the two.

Speaking of touring and making your way back to the Midwest, I know you started in Chicago and you seem to be back a fair amount. What’s it like for you returning to Chicago and playing again in the area? You recorded the last album with the Fruit Bats in Chicago. What’s that like for you returning?

It’s always cool. I’m there so much still and it often feels to me like we never left really or that I never left. My whole family is still there and everything. It’s usually kind of hectic and chaotic, but it’s cool. Fruit Bats have been really fostered in the Northwest in a lot of ways. This is definitely a great home base especially in Seattle and Portland. It really feels like home in a lot of ways, but so does Chicago. And Chicago, it’s not one of those things where I sort moved the base of operations and they were like you forgot about us, you know, screw you or whatever. It’s basically like having two hometowns. Or three home towns even, which is really cool. I feel as much of a Chicago band as I ever have been. It’s a big enough kind of transient city that I think Chicago people don’t really care when you leave. You can sort of leave, but you’re always a part of it kind of thing.

Yeah, I get that feeling. It seems like a lot of your work is rooted in the landscape. You seem to dig into your surroundings and I’m wondering if you noticed a tonal or lyrical shift when you moved from the Midwest to the West Coast or if that was something you thought about while writing?

I think if anything I probably wrote more about the Midwest on this last record, which was my first sort of fully hatched record that was like a totally West Coast record even though we recorded it in the Midwest. It was probably my most Midwesty record. It’s probably just the result of you know when you are gone from somewhere you can sort of write with a little bit of like hindsight is 20/20 kind of perspective. I think on the previous records, the ones where I had been living in Chicago, I wrote a lot about the West and the West Coast because I spent a lot of time here too. I’ve always kind of been back and forth. I wrote about sort of nature and trees with a lot of longing because half the time I was living in Logan Square in a hot, summer-time apartment and I wanted to just sort of get out of the city. Now I think I’m writing, I’m not living in the country, but I’m living in a pretty pastoral environment in Portland and I think there’s a lot of Chicago, basically, to the new album even though it’s a sort of rustic sounding record. Lyrically, it has a lot to do with the Midwest and the Rust Belt. I mean I have a lot of affection for those places.

Read more

Posted by | August 24, 2010 | Concerts, Music | Comment 

← Previous Page