Eric Johnson is used to working slowly, turning scraps of melody into full-grown Fruit Bats albums over months or years. But Baby Man, his latest release, came in a rush. Ten days in February 2025: no revisions, no second-guessing, just insomnia, dogs, mockingbirds, and a restless guitar.
“It’s like a snapshot of a week in the life,” said Johnson. “With my other records, there might be songs I worked on for a year. But this one—I wrote and recorded everything in a week and a half. Some of the first lines were literally just things I said out loud. ‘This dog’s been barking outside my window every night.’ That was a sentence from life, and it became the first words of Moon’s Too Bright.”
The result, released on September 12, 2025 via Merge Records, is a stripped-down, vulnerable record with no percussion and minimal overdubs. Johnson played most of it alone—guitar, piano, a bit of synth—while longtime collaborator Thom Monahan handled production and mixing, their first full-length reunion since Gold Past Life in 2019.
Songs Stuck In His Head
Johnson hears the record as a cycle, each track leaning against the others. The centerpiece is Stuck in My Head Again, released as the lead single and the first preview of Baby Man.
“You’re stuck in your own head, but it’s also about a song that gets stuck in your head,” he said. “I say the line twice, and it means something different each time. To me, it’s about being haunted. That’s what the record is—songs haunting each other.”
That week was drenched in omens. Mockingbirds sang at night under a full moon, a sound that Johnson learned was both mating call and elegy. “Either they’re young males without mates, or older males whose mate has died,” he explained. “There’s something sad and poetic about that.”
The imagery seeps into the tracklist, which runs like a diary: Let You People Down, Two Thousand Four, Stuck in My Head Again, Baby Man, Creature from the Wild, Puddle Jumper, First Girl I Loved, Moon’s Too Bright, Building a Cathedral, Year of the Crow. Songs written with the lights off, where chance remarks become lyrics before dawn.
Finding His Voice
For Johnson, place has always shaped time. He can mark his decades by the cities he’s lived in.
“Chicago is where Fruit Bats formed,” he said. “I lived there through my twenties, the beginning of the band. Then Portland, with a little Seattle mixed in, for my thirties. And now L.A. for my forties. Three decades, three cities.”
Chicago gave him both Top 40 radio and Illinois alt-country—Uncle Tupelo, early Wilco. “Hard to overstate how much those bands mattered,” he admitted. The Grateful Dead’s Robert Hunter provided an even earlier spark, with his ability to build a world across songs. Later, in Portland, Tim Rutili of Caliphone became a mentor. By his late thirties, Johnson had discovered Joni Mitchell, belated but transformative. “You need to live some life to understand her,” he says.
Though Johnson has become synonymous with songwriting, he insists his truest instrument has always been his voice.
“I was always the kid who could sing,” he said. “In high school, some friends fired their lead singer and asked me to join their covers band. I frantically taught myself rhythm guitar, just enough to keep up. Singing was what I really had.”
Early on, he tried to hide it, bending his voice toward Lou Reed or indie frontmen, lowering and strangling it. But when bands like Fleet Foxes emerged, it became permissible—almost expected—for indie singers to sing full-throated. Johnson followed suit. “My voice has gotten louder and higher with each record,” he said. “On Baby Man, I leaned into that. I wrote the melodies first. The vocal line was the starting point.”
Building the Cathedral
One of the most resonant tracks, Building a Cathedral, came not from insomnia but from a tarot reading.
“The cathedral card is about your life’s work,” Johnson explained. “It’s never-ending. You may never finish it. The question is—does that matter? Or is the building itself the point?”
For someone who’s been making records for more than 20 years, the metaphor carries weight. Johnson endured 15 years of near-obscurity before wider recognition arrived in the past decade. “I’m not an early-2000s nostalgia act, even though I started then,” he says. “There were years of mostly nothing, mostly downs. Only in the past five years has there been this kind of push. But I’ve just kept building the cathedral.”
Ambition, Tempered
Despite the suddenness of Baby Man, Johnson is not casual about his craft. He admits to being “wildly ambitious,” sometimes chasing the gloss of 80s radio pop, sometimes digging into long, difficult folk forms. His discography contains both—records like Gold Past Life, which brushed Billboard, and Pet Parade, with its six-minute, two-chord waltz opener destined never to hit radio.
What’s shifted is his attitude toward being understood. “When I was younger, I was desperate for people to understand me, but I wasn’t very good at being understood,” he said. “Now I’m less desperate, and better at expressing myself. I can trust the immediacy.”
That trust runs through Baby Man. Merge Records itself calls the album a “masterclass in stripped-down vulnerability,” but Johnson describes it more simply: “brazen, blind confidence.” Writing at night, recording in his house, no percussion, no tinkering. “I’ve made a lot of records,” he says. “I’m not precious anymore. There will be more. But this one—this one is exactly what was happening that week.”
Singing Into the Night
At 47, Johnson has accepted that Fruit Bats will always exist somewhere between genres: too folky for indie rock, too idiosyncratic for folk rock. That liminal space has become his home. “I just keep ringing the bell in the way I want,” he says.
Baby Man is that bell—rung late at night, when the world is quiet enough to hear it. The mockingbirds, the barking dog, the sleepless songwriter: all folded into melodies that came first, words that followed, songs that talk to each other in the dark.
When he sings, “This dog’s been barking outside my window every night,” it lands like a half-joke, half-confession. That’s the beauty of Baby Man: a record that doesn’t try to explain itself, only to exist in the moment it was made.
As Johnson puts it, “I think people respond to immediacy. That’s what this record is. Just what was happening right then.”
And then, like the bird singing at midnight, he moves on.
For story ideas and suggestions, Brian D’Ambrosio may be reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com
