Eric D. Johnson’s Fruit Bats has announced Gold Past Life, the band’s Merge debut , out everywhere June 21. Listen to the record’s scene-setting opener “The Bottom of It” now, which Johnson describes as “a song about simple victories, told a little bit through the notion of finding strange and fortuitous totems (round stones, turkey feathers, dead deer) and keeping them as trophies.”
Pre-order Gold Past Life in the Merge store on CD, LP, and opaque aqua Peak Vinyl, the latter of which includes a bonus 7-inch containing non-album tracks “Shane” and the previously released “Getting in a Van Again.”
Gold Past Life marks both an end and a beginning. It’s the end of an unintentional thematic trilogy of records that began with 2014’s EDJ (a solo record by name, but a Fruit Bats release in spirit) and hit an emotional peak with 2016’s Absolute Loser. They encompassed years of loss, displacement, and the persistent, low-level anxiety of the current political climate. They were written in the wake of friends who left these earthly confines and families that could have been.
“I wrote music to comfort myself,” says Johnson of those times. “It was a soothing balm.”
But these salves, these songs on Gold Past Life, also represent new beginnings—the journeys that await after making it through troubled times.
In fact, the notion of getting in a van to move on—literally and metaphorically—is exactly what Gold Past Life is all about. It’s about rejecting notions of idealized nostalgia and the process of grounding oneself in the present, both geographically and spiritually.
Fruit Bats on tour:
Jun 7-8 Sonoma, CA – Huichica Fest
Jun 21 Santa Barbara, CA – SOhO
Jun 22 Los Angeles, CA – Lodge Room
Jul 13 Mount Salon, VA – Red Wing Roots Music Festival
Jul 25 Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle (MRG30)
Jul 26 Washington, DC – Union Stage
Jul 27 Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg
Aug 1-4 Happy Valley, OR – Pickathon
Aug 08 St. Paul, MN – Turf Club
Photo by Annie Beedy
