Weird in Our Own Ways

 

Fruit Bats is a one-man band overseen by Eric D. Johnson.  I've loved everything he/they have done since 2003 or so (including his side-band Bonnie Light Horseman), when I first discovered Echolocation, the debut album.  All the way through those 20+ years, Fruit Bats has been a touchstone for me, but Pet Parade, an album that came out a couple years back, is what I go to just about anytime I need music now.  

It's lush country-drag pop, delicate but also full of denim-flavored 70s Fleetwood Mac greatness.  His voice is Supertramp merged with Glen Campbell, and the music has a synthesized ominousness and sense of fun, a hominess too. It's singer-song-writery but also contemplative beyond that, moving into this weird poetic direct-connect to my soul.  Every dang song on this thing is blissful and halfway awkwardly stupid in the way it needs to be, feelings bleeding out of every chorus and every note, with melodies laced with losses and happinesses you remember because they are being remembered for you gracefully, without fog and without regret or bitterness.

The title song on in starts with these lines:  Hello to all you out there… It feels like it’s been years and we’ve all been whispering to anyone who will hear. Here we are, once again here, weird in our own ways.

That kind of cuts to the chase to what I need now in my life I guess:  a ghostly pop-song voice greeting me, letting me know it's OK.  There's a kindness in that line that every song follows up on, and once you get into that Fruit Bats headspace you feel like an astronaut finally opening the door to your house on earth.  

Another song, called "Gull Wing Doors" takes you on a beautiful California car-ride, with plaintive air-dry nostalgia filling in the landscape and finding a way to take the place of both God and atheism.  Here are some lines from that one:  Redwing blackbirds in a ditch in the dark... Nobody really knows what's really in anyone's heart...  And anyone's heart can open up...  Open up.

See what I mean?  The words kind of flow out of their own banality into a soft sweet realm that you've never been privvy to before.  Same thing with the music.  The sound on this song, and all the others, is old-school pastiche, folk-country-rock, but then there's a flourish of synthesizers, or a French horn or harmonica shining through, all of that glazed over with perfect studio production and Robinson's Paul-Simon whisper, his need to be aloft but not above anything.

If you get a chance, check out "Gull Wing Doors".