BLOG

[ Actualités ] - Posté le 25/04/2010 à 19h34 - [Permalien]

On December, 4, 2009, we met Eric Johnson from Fruit Bats at Bordeaux' museum of modern art (CAPC). He kindly answered our questions and played a song for us.

French version, here/ version française, ici.

Photos

Muzzart: You've released your fourth album The Ruminant Band with new band members. Could you tell us how you met and started working together?

Eric: I had done the Fruit Bats for a really long time just as myself and had been living on the West Coast of the US, the North West and I had played with a lot of great musicians in Chicago though because that's where I'm from so I decided to make the next record in Chicago with some of these old friends. That's how I ended up getting these guys together. So it was the sort of people that either I knew or I had known or I had friends who knew them. I was kinda sick of doing things on my own so I decided to enlist some help.

Muzzart: It's more fun.

Eric: Yeah, it's more fun that way! I needed some partners in crime! (laughing)

Muzzart: What did they bring to the album?

Eric: They brought their own voices to it. A lot of times when I would record albums before, I would just go in the studio and play on an acoustic guitar and build things over that but we were able to do things a little more in a live context in the studio. The thing that really helped us is that the live show is better for it because we can play things more like what they are on the album.

Muzzart: Where did you record the album and how long did it take you?

Eric: We did it in Chicago. Our drummer Graeme Gibson is the producer of the album and he has his own studio. The studio is called Clava Studio, it's on the South side of Chicago in an old Italian neighborhood so we ate a lot of very good pasta and drank wine and coffee. It took us only about two weeks.

Muzzart: There's a song that I really like which is "Being on our own". Could you tell us how you wrote this song?

Eric: That was one of the first songs I wrote for the album and I started it as a very simple acoustic song and it went through the most changes of any songs. In the end it sounded like Creedence Clearwater Revival, it was a very rocked out sort of blues song. We did that by accident one night in the studio, it was like one o'clock in the morning. The lyrics are a little bit dark. I just like the idea of this line "You are not alone in being on your own" like we're all sad and lonely sometimes but we can take solace in that.

Muzzart: And can you tell us about "The Ruminant Band" which is a song and the title of the album as well?

Eric: I live in Portland, Oregon. I ride my bike a lot along the river and there are tons of homeless people living in tents. There are also a lot of hippies, of people living out in nature and I just sort of wrote that song about them. I was interested in the stories of these people and made up stories about them. When I put together this new band we almost thought about changing the name and The Ruminant Band was one of the name ideas.