BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Find Local//findlocal.community//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:19700308T020000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:19701101T020000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:91d79690-7275-4bd5-8f9a-f1ba1c7cbdbd@findlocal.community DTSTAMP:20261012T015830Z DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20261108T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20261108T210000 SUMMARY:Fruit Bats DESCRIPTION:The midwest\, particularly the part of the midwest Eric D. Jo hnson 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 blin k and you’ll miss other man-made rejoinders to horizontal living dotting the landscape\, hill after hill\, built from the refuse of the past: la ndfills. Some of these hills make for great sledding spots\, parks\, and trails. Others turn organic waste into compost. The Landfill\, Fruit Ba ts’ June 12\, 2026 album from Merge Records\, is something else entirely : a mountain dominating the landscape of Johnson’s heart. This being a F ruit Bats record\, one scales that mountain to take in the view\, to see the future spread out as wide and endless as the midwestern plains. “Bu t the mountain that gives us this vantage point\,” Johnson says\, “is ma de out of the trash that we’ve created\, the collective weight of the pa st and where it’s taken us.” When he details that view on title track an d lead single “The Landfill” — “a holy vision of what could be and could n’t be and could have been” — it’s thrilling to hear him sent soaring by a full complement of instruments. But what’s truly stunning is how\, in his recontouring from could to couldn’t to could have been\, he has los t none of the vulnerability that was brought to the foreground of his so ngwriting by 2025’s solo outing\, Baby Man. Over the course of his now 2 5-year career under the moniker\, most of Eric D. Johnson’s output as Fr uit Bats has been the product of patience and fine-tuning. His songs\, t o borrow a phrase\, are slow growers\, given life on albums that encompa ss long stretches of time and memory. Baby Man changed that — he disallo wed himself from referring to material he’d been working on before layin g the album down\, utilizing the morning pages technique of stream-of-co nsciousness\, observational songwriting which flowed directly into his a fternoon recording sessions. It was both a breathtaking document of John son’s skill as a singer-songwriter and an unvarnished account of the two weeks in which he recorded the album. Baby Man’s closeness to Johnson’s heart and the close attention to his voice and instrument its minimalis t-maximalist ethos required uncorked something in him as he wrote toward s a new full band effort. “That session was over\,” he explains\, “but t here 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.” Wi thin weeks\, he was back in a studio\, this time with his band — David D awda (bass)\, Josh Mease (guitars\, synth)\, Frank LoCrasto (piano\, syn th)\, 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 The Landfill\, it’s not hard to understand why : simply put\, this band smokes. Producing the initial recording session s in Washington’s Bear Creek Studios\, Johnson set out to capture “the s ound of this band I constantly marvel at\, the feeling of being in a roo m 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 The Landfill’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.” It’s also th e most live a Fruit Bats record has been since 2009’s The Ruminant Band\ , and in paring back the number of tracks that typically layer a full-ba nd song\, the psychedelic\, technicolor dreaminess of their sound is mor e vivid than ever. Time and space melt into the sublime as the band gels around Johnson’s hazy croon on “That Goddamn Sun\,” stretching out to a ccommodate him as he trips from California to North Carolina. In strikin g a balance between ecstatic romance and melancholia\, “Think Aboutcha” occupies the blissful-but-doomed intersection of the E Street Band and P aul McCartney\, playful but playing for stakes that are larger than life \, while “Perhaps We’re a Storm” charges headlong into the unknown. All of these songs — most of the songs on The Landfill\, in fact — mark them selves immediately as some of the best in Eric D. Johnson’s ever-expandi ng 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 anx ieties\, his dreams and failures\, what’s passed and what will come to p ass\, were it just him\, his guitar\, and the listener.\n\nTickets: http s://www.ticketmaster.com/fruit-bats-portland-maine-11-08-2026/event/0100 6473D1928C5E\n\nhttps://findlocal.community/event/91d79690-7275-4bd5-8f9 a-f1ba1c7cbdbd LOCATION:State Theatre\, 609 Congress St\, Portland\, ME 04101 URL:https://findlocal.community/event/91d79690-7275-4bd5-8f9a-f1ba1c7cbdb d STATUS:CONFIRMED SEQUENCE:0 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR