Fruit Bats - Mouthfuls

Fruit Bats are from Chicago, Illinois. The line-up is a bit nebulous, but revolves around Eric Johnson (guitars, keys, songwriting). Eric sings most of the leads, everybody else sings with him. The more observant amongst you might recognize Eric from his stint playing guitar and banjo with near-legendary folk weirdoes Califone, or as live multi-instrumentalist with Ugly Casanova and Sally Timms. Fruit Bats have toured with Modest Mouse, The Shins and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, and they’ve done a handful of headlining tours as well. Produced by Brian Deck, Mouthfuls is a collection of beautiful, heart-felt music in an age that resists beautiful, heart-felt music. Call them love songs dedicated to Ma Nature, primal lullabies, folk-pop gems (with an increasing emphasis on pop). It’s music for all sorts, or at least, the curious soul in everyone.

"Around the making of the album, Fruit Bats had coalesced into a duo with Gillian Lisée and myself. Gillian was my girlfriend at the time and we had gone through kind of a tumultuous start to things and broke up for a time. In the interim I wrote a bunch of bummed-out love songs that ended up on the record. It was sort of like our own mini cocaine-free version of Rumors. By the time we were making Mouthfuls in the summer of 2002, we were back on and all was good. She wrote the bridge to Magic Hour, which is totally about her. We also co-wrote Track Rabbits together which is still one of my favorite things I've ever done and probably my favorite song on Mouthfuls. I wrote When U Love Somebody at the very last minute right before we started to record. It was kind of the throwaway track, which of course became by far the most popular song on the album and is still probably the most popular Fruit Bats song. But it took me about 3 minutes to write. I still didn’t have lyrics when we recorded it so I just repeated the one verse I’d written, which is how it stands today. Nowadays there are a lot of clappy-stompy cute songs like this that are not so much my bag, but back then I was just trying to make something that sounded like Ray Davies, or even more specifically The Beatles’ Two of Us. Also, I spelled ‘you’ with a ‘U’ to reference Prince - this was a few years before I’d ever heard of text-speak. Just wanted to clear that up. People still like dancing to this one at our shows and I’m still cool with playing it. Brian Deck was the wizard on this one, plain and simple. I really just wanted to make something that sounded like Nilsson or Ray Davies or psychy-folky, but Brian had the concept for folding in electronics and weirdness. There’s a lot of headphone ear candy on this record, which at times sounds really small-sounding at first listen but is really pretty orchestrated. I am beyond stoked for folks to hear this thing on vinyl for the first time ever, and to play some duct-tape free shows.” - Eric D. Johnson, September 2013