Baby Man, the new album by Fruit Bats, is like nothing else in Grammy-nominated songwriter Eric D. Johnson's catalog. Little in the arc of his career-including Fruit Bats' evolution from home recording project to rollicking roadshow, his solo output, and his work with Bonny Light Horseman-points the way to this album, in which his only accompaniment, aside from the occasional blush of synthesizer, is a guitar, banjo, or piano. Save for producer Thom Monahan, reuniting with Johnson for the first time since Fruit Bats' 2019 breakthrough Gold Past Life, it's just Johnson in the room, meaning that when the turntable's needle meets Baby Man's groove, it's just him and the listener, mutually in for a reckoning. Monahan's return to the booth was vital: having mapped the outer limits of Eric D. Johnson's musical imagination, nobody was better equipped for the deepest trip yet into his soul. Baby Man is an intimate album, but rather than deliver a stripped-down or back-to-basics approach to the Fruit Bats sound, it's introspection is rendered at epic scale. "It's minimalist-maximalism," Johnson says of his and Monahan's approach. "There are fewer tracks on each song-four or five at most compared to recent albums where there'd maybe be five tracks on a song just for synths-but this is me at my most hi-fi." What he and Monahan do to striking effect on Baby Man is explore the full power and range of his voice. Pushed forward in the mix, Johnson's vocals-a showstopping element of his craft- have new purpose and depth on Baby Man, breathing life into some of the rawest songs he's ever written into being, actively finding the heart in the lyrics sometimes just hours after they'd been penned. A text sent to Monahan one morning-"I'm just trying to write a couple more songs"-later becomes the first line of "Puddle Jumper," a finger-picked heartbreaker whose only competition for the crown of Most Emotionally Devastating Fruit Bats Song is the other eight Johnson originals on this album. "Stuck in My Head Again" finds Johnson pouring himself out over his guitar, his voice alternately contemplative and softly raging, straining to keep the reverie he conjures from his delicate playing from crumbling beneath the weight. It and opener "Let You People Down" are what Johnson refers to as the album's "mission statements," songs about love and loss and disappointment, "about how a life can get lived and wisdom can be gained, but how there's always going to be more to learn." It's all there in the lyrics, but what's striking is how Johnson processes them, how, in a room where the only heart laid bare is his own, he is at once self-effacing and tender. "It's about a lot of things and it's about rebirth," Johnson says of title track "Baby Man," which is slippery and true to the song and album, it's dark night spent contemplating his place in life bleeding into other nights where he found himself thinking about the Los Angeles wildfires, his neighbor's new dog, his own dog (about which he wrote the staggering "Creature from the Wild"), his songs, and songs he's always loved. Again and again, Baby Man sees Johnson ask a central question: Is any of this worth it? The album itself is the answer, a resounding "yes" against the pain and struggle Johnson surfaced from to record it. At times it feels as if there is no horizon on Baby Man, barely a room beyond the space Eric D. Johnson occupies. Then the intensity of this gaze is broken-by a creaking chair, by a pattern thumped against a guitar, by the gentle twinkle of a synth, by a particularly gorgeous couplet- and suddenly one is grateful just to be in that space with him. There are no Fruit Bats albums like Baby Man. None until this point have demanded this kind of attention. It's a linchpin in Johnson's career, one that not only opens Fruit Bats up to a thrilling future but recontextualizes his past, arguing that he is one of his generation's great singer-songwriters and will be for some time to come.
