Logjam Presents is pleased to welcome Fruit Bats for a live in concert performance at The Wilma on Sunday, May 19, 2024.
Tickets go on sale Friday, January 26, 2024 at 10:00AM at The Top Hat & online. All tickets are general admission and a limited amount of seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. All ages are welcome.
Take a look at these tips to best prepare yourself for a smooth ticket buying experience.
Additional ticketing and venue information can be found here.
Eric D. Johnson rarely lingers at one location too long.
“There’s always been motion in my life between one place and another,” says the Fruit Bats songwriter.
As a kid growing up in the Midwest, Johnson’s family moved around a lot, but it wasn’t until he became a touring musician years later that motion became a central part of his identity. That transient lifestyle stoked an enduring reverence for the world he watched pass by through a van window.
“It weighs heavily on me—the notion of place,” Johnson says. “The places I’ve been and the places I want to go.”
A sense of place is a unifying theme he’s revisited with Fruit Bats throughout its many lives. From the project’s origins in the late ’90s as a vehicle for Johnson’s lo-fi tinkering to the more sonically ambitious work of recent years, Fruit Bats has often showcased love songs where people and locations meld into one. It’s a loose song structure that navigates what he calls “the geography of the heart.”
“The songs exist in a world that you can sort of travel from one to another,” says Johnson. “There are roads and rivers between these songs.”
Those pathways extend straight through the newest Fruit Bats album, aptly titled A River Running to Your Heart. Self-produced by Johnson—a first for Fruit Bats—with Jeremy Harris at Panoramic House just north of San Francisco, it’s Fruit Bats’ tenth full-length release. The album finds the project in the middle of a people-powered climb leading to the biggest shows, loudest accolades, and most enthusiastic new fans in Fruit Bats history! It’s hard to pinpoint a single reason for this mid-career resurgence. But after two decades of making music, hard-earned emotional maturity has clearly seeped into Johnson’s already inviting songs, resulting in a sound that’s connected with audiences like no other previous version of the band.
A River Running to Your Heart represents the fullest realization of Johnson’s creative vision to date. It’s a sonically diverse effort that largely explores the importance of what it means to be home, both physically and spiritually. And while that might seem like a peculiar focus for an artist who’s constantly in motion, for Fruit Bats, home can take many forms—from the obvious to the obscure.
Lead single “Rushin’ River Valley” is a self-propelled love song written about Johnson’s wife that clings to the borrowed imagery of the place where she grew up in northern California. Then, there’s the gentle and unfussy acoustic ballad “We Used to Live Here,” which looks back to a time of youthful promise and cheap rent. But the wistful “It All Comes Back” is perhaps the most stunning and surprising track on the album, Johnson’s production skills on full display. Built upon intricate layers of synths, keyboards, and guitars, it’s a pitch-perfect blend of tone and lyricism that taps into our shared apprehensions and hopes for a post-pandemic life.
“We lost some time / But we can make it back / Let’s take it easy on ourselves, okay?” sings a world-weary but ultimately reassuring Johnson in the song’s opening lines. It’s the kind of performance that makes you hope Fruit Bats stays in this one place, at least for a little while longer.
About David Nance & Mowed Sound
David Nance and Mowed Sound is the first album by the Nance group on Third Man Records but it arrives on the heels of over a decade of sprawling releases by the prolific Omaha songwriter. Songs like these don’t spring from the head of Zeus, after all. Picasso famously said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” an admission that the only way you can hope to ever be original is to impersonate, chew up, distort and regurgitate without shame the things you love that came before. You can’t kill your idols until you catch up with them and you’ll never catch up with them if you don’t figure out how the hell they do what they do.
All of this is to say you’re listening to a rare artist who’s found his own voice through a voracious appetite for anything that rocks, anything that soothes and all the glorious static and disturbed transmissions in between. I’ve seen Dave wear a Chrome t-shirt until it practically fell off his body. I’ve also heard him sing a Bonnie Raitt song around a campfire that had everybody crying long before the smoke got in our eyes.
The Mowed Sound is the latest incarnation of the Nance project, a sympathetic crew of Omaha veteran co-conspirators. The core band on this album includes long-term members James Schroeder on guitars and keyboards and Kevin Donahue on drums and percussion. Local Omaha legend, Dereck Higgins, is responsible for the bass on all but one song here. New member, Sam Lipsett, plays bass on the closing track and Pearl Lovejoy Boyd provides haunting harmony on the album’s stunning duet, Tumbleweed.
The album breaks from the gate with Mock the Hours, a song that reminds us what a ferocious band the Nance group can be. Just as quickly as they raise our heart rates, however, the deeper, darker grooves which fortify the album begin to take root. This band has soul and it’s a delight to hear rhythm stealing the show in songs like Side Eyed Sam, Cut It Off, and Tergiversating. Listen for echoes of the great Bill Withers in Credit Line. The equally hypnotic Cure vs Disease sounds like it could have been recorded in Link Wray’s legendary 3-track shack a decade before Nance was born.
“The whole album is a big magic trick,” Nance says. And from the hypnotic pulse that permeates the songs to the incantatory lyrics sliding around the rhythms, it does feel like some kind of dark arts are at work. The guitars are never dispersed with, of course, but they are used more like scalpels from JJ Cale’s black bag than with the wild abandon found on previous albums. This inspired choice leaves space for some Faustian experimental electronics and noisy grit lurking within the rich humus of these songs to make us question our footing. “Most of these songs were written as country songs and then were perverted into different forms,” Nance confided, “but it sure as shit isn’t a country record.”
As the songs draw to a close, the listener is treated to a cinematic masterstroke in the album’s tour de force, In Orlando. Featuring a heartburned narrator so bereft that the Florida sun itself feels like cruel and unusual punishment, it is, perhaps, Nance’s finest song to date and a colossal bummer so beautiful you can’t even be sore about how it casts a reverse shadow over all the songs that came before. In one gorgeous gesture, Nance manages to tip his hat to Neil Young’s Motion Pictures, pay off Warren Zevon’s famous motel bill, and leave his own name in the wet concrete between the hovering palm trees.