Eric D Johnson (Fruit Bats, The Shins) and Brett Newski discuss finding fellow weirdos, school bus life, failing drivers test, being too ugly for MTV, CD revival parties, and finding max joy in life as a human. Newski talks about the time he got fired for skipping work to see a Delta Spirit show.
More on Fruit Bats (sub pop records): http://www.fruitbatsmusic.com/
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Eric D Johnson and Brett Newski live
SNIPPET:
Brett: You’ll maybe appreciate this—I was at the record store, and they had young, smart kids in their early 20s, and they said, “Hey, there’s tons of 14 and 15 year old kids coming in an buying cassettes” and, I don’t know what that means, but I think it’s a good sign.
Eric: Yeah, and also, with LPs, the CD era...I think CDs will cycle back in as some sort of retro item. I mean, they already sort of are.
Brett: You think so?
Eric: It’s a retro, physical media. At least in my tiny, small sample size of nerdy guys on the internet. I have a CD player in my tour van still, because it’s a 2008 van, but still, my CDs live in the van, and I don’t have a ton anymore.
But I can see that. You have streaming, and I think people want some kind of interesting physical media. CDs are probably not interesting to kids right now, who are old enough to probably remembr growing up with those.
Brett: I wonder, in the future, what a CD listening party looks like. Do you have the CD tower with all the cases? Does everyone bring a CD and you listen to it? Do you play with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures while you listen? I don’t know.
Eric: *laughs* You very well may. I think the thing with CDs is that they’re basically the same thing as streaming, in that it’s unlimited time. And now, we still think, at least with my label, it has to be 41 minutes, because we’re still thinking about it in vinyl album. We’re sort of back into thinking about things in LP format.
Brett: Under 41 minutes? To fit it on a vinyl?
Eric: Yeah, to fit it on vinyl. I just remember, even when I was making my first two Fruit Bat albums, they didn’t even come out on LP. And that was in 2001 and 2003, including my first Sub Pop record. They were like, “No, we don’t do that.”
By 2005 it was starting to happen again. But to compare, I just started covering Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, and that record is hours long. Because it was firmly in the CD era, 1993.
Brett: Yeah
Eric: All the songs are six minutes long, and it was totally different. Now we’re sort of back to the 1960s in how we approach records. That includes doing singles, that maybe don’t belong to a record, you topload your record with your singles, and you make a record that fits on a record. It’s totally weird.
