Fruit Bats Return with ‘Baby Man’, Bad Bunny Takes A Stand, Mary Jane Girls, And More
This week on Discologist, Eduardo and Kevin are blissing out to the stripped-down masterpiece that is Fruit Bats’ Baby Man. PLUS: Bad Bunny takes a stand on the current state of U.S. immigration policy, we ask why they don’t make ’em like Mary Jane Girls anymore, and more!
Featured Album
Baby Man
Fruit Bats
In 2019, Eric D. Johnson signed his newly resurrected Fruit Bats to Merge Records, kicking off a new phase — a Johnsonaissance, if you will — of an already remarkable career. Since then, he’s released three (or four, if you count his 2020 reinterpretation of Siamese Dream), critically acclaimed records on the label, become one-third of the folk supergroup Bonnie Light Horseman, and toured relentlessly. Last year, he even curated his own mini-festival, My Sweet Midwest, in Chicago, featuring Kevin Morby and Hurray for the Riff Raff.
Which is why Baby Man might come as a surprise. Instead of going bigger, Johnson stripped his songwriting down to the studs.
A collection of ten songs that frequently feel like they barely exist, Baby Man features some of the most honest and exhilarating songwriting of Johnson’s career. Often just piano or guitar and voice, the album explores themes of self-doubt, existential wonder, and first loves with startling clarity going full galaxy-brain on his themes while remaining remarkably intimate and of this world.
Opener “Let You People Down” could be a simple lament on fame and life on the road in someone else’s hands. And maybe it is. But here, it plays more like the desperate bargaining of someone reckoning with solitude in a world that barely knows they exist. Similarly, “First Girl I Loved” (an update of Jackson Browne’s update of The Incredible String Band’s song ) leans heavily on shared nostalgia, but ultimately feels like it’s about every relationship you’ve ever had, all at once.
On earlier records, Johnson’s trick was to lure the listener in with humor before hitting them with heartbreak. On Baby Man, he mostly skips the pleasantries (though the songs are quietly hilarious at times), delivering one intimate truth after another, each cutting closer to the bone than the last.
But it’s not until the final track, “Building a Cathedral,” that the arguable thesis of the record fully reveals itself. The song begins with the singer building walls to keep his world safe, only to realize that no world is worth much unless it welcomes others in, offering them safety too. We are, after all, all in this together. And Baby Man is a quiet, remarkable reminder of that. — Kevin
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