Fruit Bats (Solo) at Aladdin Theater
Schedule
Wed, 04 Feb, 2026 at 08:00 pm
UTC-08:00Location
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave, Portland, OR, United States, Oregon 97202 | Portland, OR
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This Event is All Ages
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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.
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.
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Where is it happening?
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave, Portland, OR, United States, Oregon 97202Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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