{"product_id":"fruit-bats-the-landfill","title":"Fruit Bats - The Landfill","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe midwest, particularly the part of the midwest Eric D. Johnson hails from, is a largely flat expanse. Zipping through it on the highway, you’ll see cities and towns rise up in the distance, but blink and you’ll miss other man-made rejoinders to horizontal living dotting the landscape, hill after hill, built from the refuse of the past: landfills. Some of these hills make for great sledding spots, parks, and trails. Others turn organic waste into compost. \u003cem\u003eThe Landfill\u003c\/em\u003e is something else entirely: a mountain dominating the landscape of Johnson’s heart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver the course of his now 25-year career under the Fruit Bats moniker, most of Eric D. Johnson’s output has been the product of patience and fine-tuning. His songs, to borrow a phrase, are slow growers, given life on albums that encompass long stretches of time and memory. Baby Man changed that — he disallowed himself from referring to material he’d been working on before laying the album down, utilizing the morning pages technique of stream-of-consciousness, observational songwriting which flowed directly into his afternoon recording sessions. It was both a breathtaking document of Johnson’s skill as a singer-songwriter and an unvarnished account of the two weeks in which he recorded the album.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBaby Man’s closeness to Johnson’s heart and the close attention to his voice and instrument its minimalist-maximalist ethos required uncorked something in him as he wrote towards a new full band effort. “That session was over,” he explains, “but there was way more to explore. I liked the immediacy of it, and I wanted to see how that would translate into a full-band Fruit Bats record.” Within weeks, he was back in a studio, this time with his band — David Dawda (bass), Josh Mease (guitars, synth), Frank LoCrasto (piano, synth), and Kosta Galanopoulos (drums) — with whom Johnson has spent over a decade building Fruit Bats into one of the most in-demand live acts in indie rock. Listening to \u003cem\u003eThe Landfill\u003c\/em\u003e, it’s not hard to understand why: simply put, this band smokes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eProducing the initial recording sessions in Washington’s Bear Creek Studios, Johnson set out to capture “the sound of this band I constantly marvel at, the feeling of being in a room with musicians you love and trust enough to let them cook.” They laid most of it down on the floor — no click tracks, no comped vocals, and minimal overdubs, with frequent collaborator Thom Monahan returning to provide additional production and \u003cem\u003eThe Landfill\u003c\/em\u003e’s final mix. “It’s how we do things with my other band, Bonny Light Horseman, and I was curious to see how it would work with Fruit Bats,” Johnson notes. “It’s both a very personal record, and my most collaborative to date.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll of these songs — most of the songs on \u003cem\u003eThe Landfill\u003c\/em\u003e, in fact — mark themselves immediately as some of the best in Eric D. Johnson’s ever-expanding songbook, seekers and anthems alike. It’s the most daunting peak he’s scaled yet, musically or lyrically: a swashbuckling set of full-band jammers couldn’t be more honest and open-hearted about his hopes and anxieties, his dreams and failures, what’s passed and what will come to pass, were it just him, his guitar, and the listener.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MERGE","offers":[{"title":"Pink Splatter in Clear LP","offer_id":51128447402262,"sku":"RMX-64996","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":51128447435030,"sku":"RMX-64997","price":23.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":51128447467798,"sku":"RMX-64998","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0839\/7750\/2998\/files\/3e64315f48d66ce8fa6f0c32828bfe8e.png?v=1774277875","url":"https:\/\/resident-music-uk.myshopify.com\/products\/fruit-bats-the-landfill","provider":"Resident Music UK","version":"1.0","type":"link"}