When you are tasked with covering “the arts” – all of them – you have to be careful not to accept every offer to interview every musical artist who tours through Denver because that could quickly turn into a full-time job. (The greatest job ever but, still …)

But when I heard Fruit Bats were coming back to Denver on Friday, I specifically asked to speak to Eric D. Johnson, for two reasons. One, I love his (essentially) one-man band, with its warm vocals, arresting lyrics and irresistible melodies. For 25 years, Fruit Bats has been kind of a fun side project that Johnson has worked on around contributing to other super-hip bands like Califone, Vetiver and the Shins. That is, until his 2019 record “Gold Past Life” broke out and introduced him to a whole new generation of fans.

Johnson is to Fruit Bats what Sam Beam is to Iron and Wine: One guy who started in a basement with a four-track machine who surrounds himself with an ever-changing roster of all his coolest musical friends who then make great records and live shows. When I hear Johnson sing, it’s kind of like listening to an American version of Glenn Tillbrook of Squeeze. They’re both adventurous. Inherently optimistic. You just can’t help but feel happier listening to either one of them.

Second, because I selfishly wanted to tell Johnson two stories, and hear what he thinks of them. Turns out the first one (so I’ve been told) is maybe kind of dark. I told Johnson I have what I call my “Stroke Playlist.” (As I said to Johnson – hear me out.) I’ve told my family that if I ever become incapacitated and moved into someone’s basement, just put my headphones on me, turn on my stroke playlist, and I will be just fine for at least 12 hours.

My Fruit Bats contribution to that playlist is called “Humbug Mountain Song,” a tune I say is about learning to accept life for what it is. Perfectly placed, I think, for a time of life when one might be transitioning, say, from speaking to post-speaking.

“Well, I find that thing that you did is maybe very weird – but kind of strangely beautiful, too, and I tip my cap to you for doing something so odd,” Johnson said. But he gets it. Johnson, after all, is known for exploring what he calls “the pre- and post-memory mindset.”

“‘Humbug Mountain Song is about sense memory,” he said. “And I do like to write about ‘point of birth’ and even ‘moment of death’ as well. ‘Humbug Mountain Song’ is a little bit about the notion of the soul, and it’s also about the paralysis of love, and it’s a little bit about sex, too, and it’s about the notion of a tiny death.”

Play it on loop, I say.

Fruit Bats (named after flying foxes that love to feed on fruit, flowers and nectar) is coming to Denver’s Ogden Theatre in support of its ninth album, “A River Running to Your Heart.” Just a year ago, Fruit Bats played consecutive nights at the Bluebird Theater, with Denver having the distinction of being just one of three lucky cities to get two nights with completely different set lists. Austin and San Francisco were the others – and Johnson quickly learned the error of his ways.

“It was really, really cool, but we are not doing that again,” he said with a laugh. “I discovered pretty quickly that you really have to be a jam band to do two completely unique sets – because my songs are only about 3 minutes long. Two nights of Fruit Bats, with no repeats, is what, 43 songs? I was like, ‘Oh, this is harder than I thought. If you’re Phish, you only have to play, like, 11 songs, and all of them are really, really long.”

So what is his only Denver audience in for this time around? “Hopefully, it’ll be the hit parade,” he said with another laugh. “We will be well into our tour when we get to Denver, so whatever we play, I think it’s going to sound good.”

“A River Running to Your Heart” (called “a complete triumph” by megacritic.com) is out now, but when we spoke for this column a few months ago, it wasn’t, and at that time, the media could only sample three songs.

Johnson was a bit bemused that I was joining a growing chorus of interviewers telling him, in effect, that the new record seems to signal a welcome period in Johnson’s life changing over from emotional isolation (thank you, pandemic) into, not an awakening but rather a waking up, and a sense of good things to come.

“Clearly there must be something to that,” he said, “but I can tell you that was certainly not intentional at all. I didn’t sit down to write a post-pandemic record because that’s not what I was consciously going for.”

So I asked him: What was he going for?

“I’ve been calling this my emotional geography record,” he said. “It’s about what it means to be home, both physically and spiritually. But I’d like to think my last six years’ worth of records all kind of speak to each other, and they’re all part of a continuum.”

Johnson is not the kind of writer who retreats into a cabin in the woods until a theme (and a record) come out. He says at this point of his career, making any new album is just checking in with your joys and sorrows at any given time. Making your ninth record, he said, is not like making your first, which for him came out in 2001 (“Echolocation”).

“When you make your first record, it’s everything you’ve done in your life up to then – so that could be 10 years’ worth of work. I remember making my first record and trying to cram everything I had into it,” he said. “It was like I had made a very weird-tasting pot of soup, because I had to use every ingredient I had in the kitchen. Like it’s all going to go bad otherwise. I had this feeling this might be the last time I get to do this in a professional studio. But I don’t feel that way anymore.”

As someone who has also covered theater for as long as Peterson has played in Fruit Bats, I had to ask him about his folk supergroup Bonny Light Horseman with Josh Kaufman and Anaïs Mitchell, who wrote the spellbinding Broadway musical “Hadestown.” Johnson has scored films, after all, so I had to know: Would you write your own  stage musical – with or without Mitchell’s help? His answer was kind of crushing.

“Anaïs impresses me on every level, but when I saw ‘Hadestown,’ I was just like, ‘How does one even do this?’” he said. “I mean, I feel like I am a long way into my creative career. I feel like I could do a lot of things, or at least give it at the old college try. Like, I don’t know, write a novel or make a movie. But doing a musical? That seems utterly insane to me. I don’t know if I could do what she does. I think she’s a special force, for sure.”

Way up top, I said there were two stories I really wanted to tell Johnson, and I saved the best for last.

The second one goes back to 2003. One of my best friends is in hangdog love with a girl who has to leave him for the summer because she has a job working at a Christian camp. He applies for a job there just so he can be close to his girlfriend. The camp is very restrictive about what kinds of music can be played there, but somehow, my friend convinces camp leaders that “Mouthfuls” by Fruit Bats is a Christian album, and they let him play it on loop. He spent the whole summer making out with his girlfriend to the song “When U Love Somebody” in a pottery camp closet.

“Wow, I love that story,” Johnson said. “But hey, a lot of people have made out to that song. That is a make-out song, for sure. I know that for a fact. But I think the Christian thing is really hilarious because it’s decidedly not a Christian record. It does start with a song called “Rainbow Sign,” where God gives Noah a rainbow as a sign of hope. It’s a Biblical reference, but it’s certainly not a Christian song. It’s Old Testament – so it’s pre-Christ. I don’t think there are any Christian references on the record at all. I was definitely a godless heathen when I made that record. So I think that’s very funny.

“I’m so happy you told me that story,” he added. “It’s so much less disturbing than your stroke playlist story.”