eTown Taping with Fruit Bats (solo) and Cat Clyde

Name: eTown Taping with Fruit Bats (solo) and Cat Clyde
Start: 2026-03-29T19:00:00-06:00
End: 2026-03-29T21:30:00-06:00
Location: 1535 Spruce St, Boulder, CO, United States, Colorado 80302

Schedule

Sun Mar 29 2026 at 07:00 pm to 09:30 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

1535 Spruce St, Boulder, CO, United States, Colorado 80302 | Boulder, CO

Fruit Bats and Cat Clyde joins us for an eTown taping of our nationally syndicated radio show and podcast.
Doors: 6 p.m.
Show: 7 p.m.
All Ages Welcome
No Refunds or Exchanges
With every eTown ticket purchase, you're supporting the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. eTown donates $1 per ticket to Conscious Alliance, aiding hunger relief, youth programs and sustainable solutions for the Oglala Lakota Nation.
About Fruit Bats:
Baby Man, the new album by Fruit Bats, is like nothing else in Grammy-nominated songwriter Eric D. Johnson’s catalog. Little in the arc of his career — including Fruit Bats’ evolution from home recording project to rollicking roadshow, his solo output, and his work with Bonny Light Horseman — points the way to this album, in which his only accompaniment, aside from the occasional blush of synthesizer, is a guitar or piano.
Save for producer Thom Monahan, reuniting with Johnson for the first time since Fruit Bats’ 2019 breakthrough Gold Past Life, it’s just Johnson in the room, meaning that when the turntable’s needle meets Baby Man’s groove, it’s just him and the listener, mutually in for a reckoning.
Working with Monahan in the past pushed Johnson to new sonic vistas, evidenced by a songbook of sprawling, ornately detailed crowd-pleasers. When Johnson produced Fruit Bats’ 2023 album A River Running to Your Heart, Monahan served as a sounding board, and their reunion started in a similar vein, with Johnson asking to borrow a microphone or two for a project that was just starting to take shape. One conversation led to another, and Baby Man came into being: an ambitious take on the sketchbook album where everything—lyrics and music—had to be newly written and recorded from scratch, everything he’d been cooking to that point left at the door. Every morning began with an empty page, every night concluded with a new song, sometimes two or three new songs, each of them terrifyingly beautiful.
Monahan’s return to the booth was vital: having mapped the outer limits of Eric D. Johnson’s musical imagination, nobody was better equipped for the deepest trip yet into his soul. Baby Man is an intimate album, but rather than deliver a stripped-down or back-to-basics approach to the Fruit Bats sound, its introspection is rendered at epic scale. “It’s minimalist-maximalism,” Johnson says of his and Monahan’s approach.
“There are fewer tracks on each song — four or five at most compared to recent albums where there’d maybe be five tracks on a song just for synths — but this is me at my most hi-fi.”
What he and Monahan do to striking effect on Baby Man is explore the full power and range of his voice. Pushed forward in the mix, Johnson’s vocals—a showstopping element of his craft—have new purpose and depth on Baby Man, breathing life into some of the rawest songs he’s ever written into being, actively finding the heart in the lyrics sometimes just hours after they’d been penned. A text sent to Monahan one morning—“I’m just trying to write a couple more songs”— later becomes the first line of “Puddle Jumper,” a finger-picked heartbreaker whose only competition for the crown of Most Emotionally Devastating Fruit Bats Song is the other eight Johnson originals on this album.
“Stuck in My Head Again” finds Johnson pouring himself out over his guitar, his voice alternately contemplative and softly raging, straining to keep the reverie he conjures from his delicate playing from crumbling beneath the weight. It and opener “Let You People Down” are what Johnson refers to as the album’s “mission statements,” songs about love and loss and disappointment, “about how a life can get lived and wisdom can be gained, but how there’s always going to be more to learn.” It’s all there in the lyrics, but what’s striking is how Johnson processes them, how, in a room where the only heart laid bare is his own, he is at once self-effacing and tender.
“It’s about a lot of things and it’s about rebirth,” Johnson says of title track “Baby Man,” which is slippery and true to the song and album, its dark night spent contemplating his place in life bleeding into other nights where he found himself thinking about the Los Angeles wildfires, his neighbor’s new dog, his own dog (about which he wrote the staggering “Creature from the Wild”), his songs, and songs he’s always loved. Again and again, Baby Man sees Johnson ask a central question: Is any of this worth it? The album itself is the answer, a resounding “yes” against the pain and struggle Johnson surfaced from to record it.
At times it feels as if there is no horizon on Baby Man, barely a room beyond the space Eric D. Johnson occupies. Then the intensity of this gaze is broken—by a creaking chair, by a pattern thumped against a guitar, by the gentle twinkle of a synth, by a particularly gorgeous couplet — and suddenly one is grateful just to be in that space with him.
There are no Fruit Bats albums like Baby Man. None until this point have demanded this kind of attention. It’s a linchpin in Johnson’s career, one that not only opens Fruit Bats up to a thrilling future but recontextualizes his past, arguing that he is one of his generation’s great singer - songwriters and will be for some time to come.
About Cat Clyde:
Cat Clyde is a singer/songwriter based out of rural Ontario, Canada. A combination of driven, soulful blues and sweet, folk-tinged, dulcet tones that carry a particular sense of familiarity provides the structure on which she creates her unique sound. With influences ranging from Patsy Cline and Lead Belly to Karen Dalton and Bobbie Gentry, this patchwork of musical significance, when stitched to her modern approach, fits like a well-tailored, corduroy road cloth. Cat is currently finishing up her next album to be released in 2026 on Concord Records, with one song being released so far, “Wild One.”