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I first discovered the band Fruit Bats in college through a friend working at the university radio station (KTUH). I had fallen in love with a few of their songs I had on a mixtape then, and over the years really only ever listened to the album those songs are from: The Ruminant Band (which is an amazing album, and one that deserves its own post sometime soon!). Recently I started to acquire more albums from Fruit Bats. For the past month or so I have been pretty much binging on their albums one at a time. I want to write about the one I have been listening to recently while it's still fresh, before I start full-on binging on another album.
The album Absolute Loser is the seventh album by Fruit Bats, and incidentally it was the first album released after an indefinite hiatus that lasted a few years. From what I understand, it was the first Fruit Bats album made with Eric D. Johnson (the founder) as the only "official" member of the group. This is an interesting contrast with the only other album of theirs I had really listened to, The Ruminant Band, whose sound Johnson attributed to his having let the band do their thing without playing band leader too much---or even playing much on the album himself, apart from vocals and some piano.
I had actually gotten my hands on a few Fruit Bats albums in search of a song of theirs I always loved and played myself, but was never able to locate on an album. Well, that song is not on Absolute Loser, but of the albums I had acquired at the time, Absolute Loser made the most memorable first impression, which I think is partly to the credit of the opening track, "From A Soon-To-Be Ghost Town." The song itself is a very easy-going strummer that lyrically has this kind of injured optimism that resonates strongly with me:
It's hard to be the last one in a soon to be ghost town
When all that you loved is now gone
And you could have moved on to anywhere
But you remember back to your first day there
On the fire escape
Smoking cigarettes
With a fresh fat lip
A new best bet
And how you didn't want to leave
'Cause you liked the air
And you said you'd never leave
'Cause you liked it then
How you still don't want to leave
'Cause you loved it there
The heavy-handed piano chords staggering behind the rapid chime of guitar in this song really capture the mood of these lyrics. It evokes memories of my early years away from home, and all the wonder, fantasy, excitement and also the anxiety, fear, and uncertainty that comes with being wayward and alone. There are always so many tensions and even contradictions in life, yet in spite of all that, there is something in it---something in the going through it all that draws you through. Maybe this theme stands out to me because I feel like an "absolute loser" in the sense illustrated by this song: here in these circumstances in spite of them. Somewhere in the struggle to move through and past the struggle you feel closer to those aspects of experience that make it what it is, and somehow that yields its own kind of power or courage. I'd like to think resilience has to do with appreciating those elemental qualities of experience, even when they are unpleasant. If you know where you're at then you have, at least, an idea of where you can go.
I find this almost Daoist theme in various forms throughout the album. The opening verse of the second track, "Humbug Mountain Song," hints at this kind of dirt-in-your-nails wonder for life. Humbug Mountain is a coastal peak in Southern Oregon, and the vibe of this song brings me back to younger chapters of my life and the many peak experiences I had camping and triping out on the coast of the Pacific Northwest:
The first time I realized I was living in this world
I was probably looking at the sky
And forgive me, but I don't know if I remember enough to say
What the air was really like that day
May have been the clouds
Or the sun
I don't recall, I was young
I like how humble and unexaggerated this verse is, yet it leads you toward a profound sense of wonder about how we're in the world. In spite of not really knowing what caused the realization that he was alive, there is this vivid sense of how that experience was; what it felt like. You can't place it though. There is a kind of wisdom embodied in those experiences where you are so immersed in a place and time that it all becomes unified in how it feels to go through it. This is most fully expressed in the title track of the album, which, for me, exemplifies what is "Daoist" or even "Zen" about the album's motif:
You're long distance van driving in the waning day
Feeling absolute heartache in the purest way
So seasick and waiting for the storm to break
An absolute loser on the verge of something great
Just waiting, waiting, waiting for the storm to break
You're long distance driving, coming around the bend
Absolutely broken in almost every sense
Your heart's sinking weighing the two sides of you
An absolute loser on the verge of something new
Just waiting, waiting, waiting for the storm to blow through
This song, "Absolute Loser," is a rolling ostinato of rambling guitar picking with a driving drum beat. It feels like you're driving up in the high desert, and when you drop down into it through the pass, this contemplative flute solo starts and everything sublimates. The lyrics and sound of this track bring me back to so many places and times in my life, which is a peculiar feeling to have them all sewn together in the dramatic tension of this song.
This almost stoic trope of vulnerability as virtuosity has been a prominent aesthetic in my adult life. It is archetypical (which I suppose all tropes are) because the tension between suffering and desire---struggle, or crisis---is a universal condition of human existence. In my late teenages years and into my early twenties, I think I really idealized this aesthetic of liminality; this experience of indeterminate yet abundant potential in states of vulnerability and despair. It has to do, partly, with the wanderlust I had at the time. One may have been a catalyst for the other. But more generally it has to do with my being a relatively sensitive kid to begin with, which, through music, I learned was a source of tremendous power.
Being able to appreciate the aesthetic integrity of even unpleasant and undesirable emotions and experiences affords a degree of serenity in spite of the circumstances. It is grounding. The situation is not just a chaotic, aimless, pandemonium of emotion, but a movement of energies working to develop the plot, so to speak. These movements have significance in their relationship to the whole situation, the whole story, and being able to really appreciate how that is uniquely true of the particular, concrete circumstances you happen to inhabit is a profound source of wisdom---even when the story is a tragic one, a story where you are the loser. And I am not talking about clairvoyance here. It is an experience that is primarily felt---a mood, an atomosphere, an impression, a hunch. There is a certain balance achieved when you are able to spread those energies out imaginatively over a stretch of time and space, as opposed to being haplessly overwhelmed and snowblind in the turbulence.
This album, I don't think, is necessarily "about" this theme---but of course, I don't really know. I suspsect that I am interpreting it this way because I have been spending every single day for the past couple months writing my dissertation, or at least mulling over the ideas contained within it.
Overall, the album has many memorable moments that will echo around the inside of your skull for weeks on end, or at least they have for me! Eric D. Johnson has a knack for melody and rhythm, and his stuff has a characteristic modesty about it, which I think really shows through on this album. Nothing is overdone. The instrumentation and the lyrics and their delivery are very humble yet earnest. Of course, all of this is something I can't really capture in a little, pathologically philosophical writeup, so you'll just have to hear for yourself!
And, in full disclosure, this post probably came too late, as I have already been binging on another Fruit Bats album, and it's one of those finds that just so quenches your musical thirst that it almost feels like destiny to hear it. So stay tuned for some mouthfuls about Mouthfuls.
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