Fruit Bats consider what-ifs on The Landfill

After using the “morning pages” technique to write Fruit Bats’ stripped-down, mostly solo 2025 album Baby Man, frontman Eric D. Johnson tried a similar approach in a different context for the follow-up. The Landfill is a full-band effort, largely recorded live in the studio. Both LPs feature songs he wrote using a stream-of-consciousness, first-thing-in-the-morning practice, though Baby Man came together faster: during a two-week stretch, Johnson spent afternoon recording sessions working on the material he had written that morning. When the record was finished, he felt like there was more to explore, so he kept going.

The idea behind morning pages is to write without inhibition to unburden the subconscious and unlock creativity. Some practitioners say you shouldn’t even re-read what you’ve written, nevermind edit it, though it seems likely that Johnson doesn’t subscribe to that particular idea. Lyrics in the ten songs on The Landfill are polished enough to suggest that the singer has spent at least a little time shaping them—or maybe his thirty years of experience writing as Fruit Bats and, since 2019, as one-third of the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman (as well as stints in the Shins and Califone) means his stream of consciousness is supremely well-honed.

Either way, The Landfill is a multi-layered, often melancholy affair as Johnson sorts through the comings and goings of life on the threshold of a milestone: the singer turned fifty this past week, which is a moment that lends itself to reflection. “Time heals all wounds is a thing they say,” he sings at the start of “All Wounds.” “But I haven’t always found it to be that way.” That truism tends to refer to emotional wounds, but Johnson has a broader definition in mind. In fact, the couplet summarizes the worldview of this album, which weighs psychic hurt alongside the tangible physical changes that humans have made on the landscape.

That balance is at the core of the title track as Johnson’s narrator sits in his car atop one of those landfills that dot the edges of Midwestern cities and muses about “what could be and couldn’t be and could have been,” in the context of the terrain surrounding, and also within, him. The song, the best on the album, has a California folk-rock feel in the blend of acoustic guitar and wistful piano knitted together with a straight-ahead rhythm and filigrees of electric guitar. Elsewhere, Johnson and his band—bassist David Dawda, guitarist Josh Mease, keyboardist Frank LoCrasto, and drummer Kosta Galanopoulos—often draw on the sound of music from an earlier generation. There’s a nod to seventies soul on opener “The Saddest Part of the Song” when Johnson slides into falsetto and sings a rising melodic line opposite cascading guitar arpeggios, while “Think Aboutcha” has a vintage power-pop feel in the steady piano vamp and wash of blaring guitars.

Mostly, though, The Landfill sounds like Johnson. Morning pages or not, his songwriting is as distinctive as the slightly nasal tone of his tenor voice, which carries these songs regardless of their instrumentation. If a track or two misfires—“Wild Pony Tower Moment” doesn’t transcend the morose rainy-day lyrical imagery, while the lilting tick-tock accompaniment on “Fishin’ for a Vision” feels just a little corny—Fruit Bats’ track record has long since demonstrated that there are more ideas on the way. Maybe it’s true that time doesn’t heal all wounds, but smart writing combined with the benefit of hindsight tends to make for compelling music—all the more so when the guy who’s writing it has decided there’s no need to spend a lot of time second-guessing himself. [Merge]

Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.

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