I think we can just waffle along a bit and then let you, favoured reader, hit the play button. Look – Eric D. Johnson is just one of our favourite Americana artists – an endless collaborator, a Bonny Light Horseman and always a Fruit Bat. And here we find him fluttering those sweet fruit seeking mammalian wings once more on a song from the new album “Baby Man.”
It’s a short and sweet song – that finds thoughts of the darkest kind beating on those night wings. It’s a searching for answers kind of song, it’s a song that revolves around a single desire – not “to let you people down.” And, like Kool and the Gang’s ‘Celebration‘ it’s non-specific about who “the people” are. It might be friends or family. It might be Johnson’s musical colleagues. It might even be us, the listener. Who’s to say? Maybe not even Johnson, although he does say: “This is an ode to the people pleasers of the world – it’s about breaking your own heart. It’s about stumbling while navigating the world and wanting to jump off the planet and take a re-set. And of course maybe it’s sneakily and/or subconsciously about my fear of how people might react to this record and its lack of boppy Fruit Bats songs that they might be waiting for. This might be the album’s mission statement, crushed up into a 2-minute long easy to swallow tablet.”
