Eric D. Johnson, the creative force behind Fruit Bats, doesn’t spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. “Maybe it speaks to some Midwest thing,” he says. “Don’t be overly reflective or navel-gazing. And as a songwriter, you always want to be looking forward, not backward.” But with the 20th anniversary of his first Fruit Bats release (2001’s Echolocation) on his mind, it seemed as good a time as any to take stock of his work—and he’s doing so in the form of Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001–2021), a two-disc collection that tracks the history of Fruit Bats from its earliest days to right now. Thoughtfully compiled by Johnson himself, this set is split in two distinct halves.

Set in reverse chronological order, the first disc cherry-picks from Fruit Bats’ official releases, including fan favorites “Humbug Mountain Song” from 2016’s Absolute Loser and “The Bottom of It” from his 2019 Merge debut Gold Past Life alongside some of Johnson’s more personal choices like “Glass in Your Feet” from Echolocation. “I was 25 when I made that record,” Johnson remembers. “I was even younger than that when I wrote that song. I think I hadn’t yet learned to write from the heart. I was trying to create a sound. It wasn’t even so much about the song at that point.” To emphasize both his reticence at dwelling on the past and to showcase how far he has grown as a songwriter, the first disc kicks off with a brand-new track, “Rips Me Up.” Recorded with Josh Kaufman, who helped produce Fruit Bats’ 2021 full-length The Pet Parade, the song is a soulful strutter about, as Johnson says in the liner notes for this set, how love “paralyzes and wounds us.”

The second disc is for longtime fans that want a deeper dive into Fruit Bats lore. To put this half of Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud together, Johnson dug into several hard drives’ worth of material. Included here are lovely early versions of “Rainbow Sign” and “The Old Black Hole,” recorded to a Tascam 4-track just as Fruit Bats was becoming a reality. There’s also a rambling take on the Steve Miller Band’s classic rock mainstay “The Joker,” and some wonderful never-before-heard original tunes.