Fruit Bats, Friday Feb. 6

[February 4th, 2009]

[LUSH POP GONE ELECTRIC] After calling Portland home for six months, Eric Johnson is driving through Ventura, Calif., fog at 1 am toward his new home in Los Angeles. He sounds both giddy to sleep in his new house and exhausted after self-managing the first six dates of a West Coast tour for his band, the Fruit Bats.

He already misses Portland. “It’s an enchanting city for so many weird reasons,” he says. “I was not planning on leaving after six months.” And though his job as a full-time musician­—he’s the mythic fifth member of iconic Portland pop outfit the Shins and plays part-time with San Francisco’s Vetiver—allows him relative freedom of movement, the PDX job market was tough on his girlfriend, photographer Annie Beedy, who took a job in L.A.

“Portland is the place to come home the conquering hero,” Johnson jokes. “You have to make your fortune, and then you come back and buy your Laurelhurst Park mansion. So that’s the plan.”

It’s not that far-fetched, really, considering the quality of Johnson’s music. What began as a folky, solo home-recording project in late ’90s Chicago has blossomed into one of Seattle label Sub Pop’s most reliably compelling pop groups. On the most recent record, 2005’s Spelled in Bones, the Fruit Bats combine a Shins-esque knack for surprising, meticulous arrangements with a dollop of twang and Posies-style power-pop (Johnson’s double-tracked vocals sound like a cross between the latter’s co-frontman, Ken Stringfellow, and a sentimental young Robyn Hitchcock). Johnson’s lyrical collages—natural and religious imagery mixed with phrases the songwriter jots down on napkins—stretch out over a calm sea of adventurous studio wizardry, and the clicks and whirs beneath the surface alone warrant repeated listens.

Which is not, Johnson says, quite what the band sounds like on the current tour. He has traded his acoustic for an electric guitar, playing songs to be recorded for the Bats’ forthcoming album. It’s the first time he’s toured on a host of material that hasn’t yet been laid down in the studio, and the songs are evolving while the band’s sets grow longer. “I almost retired the Fruit Bats name, because this is such a different concept,” he says. “But we decided not to. We couldn’t think of another band name, anyway.”

And while the Fruit Bats moniker hasn’t earned Johnson and company international stardom (his recently retooled band features Ron Lewis on keyboards, Graeme Gibson on drums, Chris Sherman on bass and Sam Wagster on guitar), he has felt momentum build slowly with each tour in the group’s 10-plus years. “I’ve seen people come and go in that time period, and I’ve seen a lot of people pass me by—or lap me, even­—but it’s never gone backward.”

When the Fruit Bats roll into Portland Friday night, Johnson may not yet have attained his “conquering hero” status. He will, however, still have a bare-walled home to sleep in. “And I still have Oregon plates on my van,” he says. “Until I get rid of those, I’ll be an Oregonian.”