Eric D. Johnson’s simple chemistry with producer Thom Monahan (Pernice Brothers, Devendra Banhart) has already led to nice issues within the kind 2019’s Gold Previous Life, Fruit Bats’ winsomely melodic Merge debut. On the brand new Child Man, the 2 reunite to craft one thing altogether totally different. It’s principally a Johnson solo album—conserving in thoughts, after all, that he’s at all times been the motor that drives Fruits Bats to start with. What’s your getting with Child Man is an unadulterated portrait of an artist on the high of his sport, alone together with his ideas, a couple of devices and heaps of knee-jerk inspiration. Johnson’s singing has by no means sounded extra susceptible and alive, and the music—stripped again, disarmingly actual and achingly stunning—matches the revelatory temper.
Johnson takes us by means of Child Man monitor by monitor.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Let You Individuals Down”
“I used to be proud this track turned out to be precisely two minutes on the nostril. It makes for an ever-so-tidy fast mission assertion for the album, about eager to please and be happy. Perhaps it’s additionally a preemptive assertion about how this album isn’t going to be stuffed with the nation disco bops that Fruit Bats followers are used to. That stated, I nonetheless imagine the entire album is aimed immediately at your chest with my emotional laser. Hopefully, this two minutes will get you steadied for the remaining—a bunch of songs about canine, birds, airplanes, moons, hearts and God.”
2) “Two Thousand 4”
“‘Attempting to be an enormous man or one thing’” is a line from this track—and that’s most likely a factor anyone informed me derisively after I was a child. A few of us desperately wish to outgrow these britches. ‘Within the yr 2004, I drove out to the West Coast in my very own tour van’—that’s the road that comes proper earlier than it, and it’s the primary sentence of the story of my previous 21 years. I could as properly have been flying to the moon. The tour van was a 1997 Ford Econoline 12-passenger—a really worthy and durable craft. I slept in it alongside the best way, ate numerous Taco Bell, listened to Grandaddy’s Sumday and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks on CD on repeat and hit the ‘play’ button on my grown life.”
3) “Caught In My Head Once more”
“Numerous this album is about that ol’ interior monologue and people way-too-quiet moments within the evening the place that unpredictable voice comes whispering your means. I like these phrases: caught in my head. I imply them fairly actually. However I additionally like how they evoke a notion of a track caught in your head … like how life and the individuals near us are type of like songs we’ve got to study. A few of them are earworms—unforgettable, good or unhealthy, or each without delay. We find yourself memorizing the lyrics, the chords and the twists and turns till they loop round in our head without end.”
4) “Child Man”
“Effectively, first off, there have been thousands and thousands of years earlier than you or I used to be round. We didn’t exist through the Ice Age or the Roman Empire or the Civil Warfare, nor might anybody then predict that we’d ever exist. Then issues occurred … miracles, actually. And all of a sudden, for a short time, we had been bobbing round within the womb. For a couple of years after that, we had been babbling innocents, and all the things was magic. This track is concerning the lack of innocence and the need to return to the egg. You may both have a look at this track in some form of Buddhist means or, should you choose, like some stoners round a campfire considering the universe.”
5) “Creature From The Wild”
“I misplaced my canine in early 2025—this track is about him. He was a wild animal once we received him. He’d lived on the streets of Baja, Calif., and possibly ate rubbish, fish guts and carrion and lived off the kindness of strangers. However perhaps he additionally took a kick to ribs each every so often. After we received him, he didn’t know something concerning the civilized world. And but he was this craving and clever little gentleman. Once I was first attending to know him, I naturally received actually fascinated by canine and studied up on them. Their tradition and language and social constructions are so much like ours. That’s why the unique jackals and wolves and prehistoric dingoes began hanging across the early man’s fireplace. They had been like, ‘I get you, man.’ They are surely our greatest mates. The largest tragedy of all of it: We elevate them like they’re our infants, however we usually outlive them fourfold. It’s not truthful.”
6) “Puddle Jumper”
“I wrote this entire album concurrently whereas recording it—in about 10 days’ time. There are a couple of songs the place the primary line is just one thing I stated aloud: ‘I’m simply attempting to write down a pair extra songs.’ Being an individual who writes and information and sings songs for a residing may be very unusual; it’s not regular. I’m not complaining. I actually, actually adore it, and I’m actually, actually fortunate. However it’s not regular. Generally it feels such as you’re trying on the world out the window of a bus that’s going very quick—and the window is tinted and you may’t open it.”
7) “First Lady I Liked”
“That is an Unbelievable String Band cowl track. Judy Collins additionally made a beautiful model of it sooner or later. Why did I put a canopy in the course of this extremely private document? The album the unique model was on, The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion, knocked me flat after I first heard it within the mid 2000s. I used to be in my 20s and attempting to write down songs and was taking all of the influences in and attempting to filter them again out into one thing that felt like me. This cowl is form of a flashback to that—and the additional layer is that the unique track itself can also be a deeply nostalgic flashback. So it is a flashback of a flashback of a flashback. And perhaps it’s me telling you my story with another person’s phrases.”
8) “Moon’s Too Brilliant”
“I wrote this and ‘Creature From The Wild’ in the identical morning and recorded them each later that afternoon—they usually each have canine in them. The recording you hear is as recent from my mind and mouth as something I’ve ever completed. The evening earlier than, I used to be saved awake for hours by two animals and a celestial physique. One of many animals was my neighbor’s canine, who was clearly agitated by the celestial physique, which was an enormous, shiny full moon. The opposite animal was a mockingbird, singing an avant-garde tune all evening lengthy, mere ft from my bed room window. Apparently, after they sing at evening like that, it means they’re looking for a mate.”
9) “Constructing A Cathedral”
“‘Constructing a cathedral’ was a beautiful sequence of phrases I heard as soon as whereas getting a tarot-card studying. Again in the best way olden instances, these cathedrals would take generations to finish. They had been designed to make you perceive that God was big and much, far above us—and that the world is intimidating and delightful. The notion of constructing a cathedral is that it takes without end and is perhaps by no means completed—however it is going to reside on after the employees who began it are gone. Within the refrain of this track, I evaluate the hugeness of all of this to the simplicity of affection. Like, what’s a ‘life’s work’ made out of, anyway?”
10) “12 months Of The Crow”
“There’s a crow in my yard who I admit to generally speaking to occasionally. I as soon as fed him potato chips, which I shortly realized most likely weren’t the healthiest snack for a crow. Though I’m positive they eat means worse issues. Subsequently, I’ve tossed him the errant uncooked almond. He hasn’t come round a lot these days, and I assume he discovered one other neighbor with higher snacks. Life is stuffed with seasons and longing and despair. Generally it’s like an airplane in mild turbulence with a robust headwind, and it’s taking means longer to land on the airport than you’d like.”
