Fishboy made an album out of ‘Denton-weird’ neighborhood lore

Eric Michener has spent the better part of 30 years writing songs about Denton — its alleys, its cul-de-sacs, the neighbors he passes on his morning walks and the stories he imagines for them. On “Bravest Neighbor,” his eighth album as Fishboy, he turns that instinct into a full-blown concept record: 12 interconnected songs following a fictional North Denton neighborhood, where every character nominates someone else on the block as the bravest person they know, all framed in a notebook found in a little free library in someone’s yard. The narrators keep changing, and the bravery, it turns out, is never where anyone expects it.

It’s a fitting origin, because Michener has spent decades convinced that the whole universe he needs is within walking distance. 

“If I’m an expert in anything, it is the things that are outside of my front door,” he tells the Observer.

An introvert who sings to his cul-de-sac

Michener is quick to describe himself as “an introverted artist with a huge imposter syndrome,” which is a wonderfully honest thing for a man who’s been mythologizing a single Texas town for decades. Fishboy started as a high-school art project in the ’90s. Eight studio albums, stacks of comic books and a fistful of strange local traditions later, he’s still pointing his telescope at the same worn-in neighborhoods, finding galaxies within them.

The magic trick of “Bravest Neighbor” is empathy disguised as eavesdropping. Every one of the album’s songs is a neighbor telling a story about another neighbor, and every narrator eventually tips their hand, revealing the isolation, heartbreak, embarrassment or anxiety they were hiding behind someone else’s tale. The characters all have names starting with “D,” a small, obsessive flourish that pays off in a climactic neighborhood chase.

There’s Danny DaChamp, a shut-in artist so fixated on his neighbor Diana’s jacket that he watches it through the blinds and writes songs about it, who still admits, “Some days I gotta fake a little courage for a step outside.” There’s that jacket itself, an actual garment passed between residents, patched and re-patched, borrowed and re-borrowed, until it becomes a kind of shared talisman.

Elsewhere in the tracklist there’s a character named Decatur, dispensing sticky-note wisdom like “it’s not a problem till it’s a problem.”

Michener believes that smallness is exactly the point. He writes on the assumption that “every idea and every feeling is at least shared by one other person.” Nobody, he insists, feels brave in the moment. The bravery only shows up later, in the retelling — which is the whole reason the notebook exists.

Sticky notes, turntables and a cast of heavyweights

To build the album, Michener covered a folding closet door in sticky notes, like a mad scientist, pairing each character with a musical style until the whole thing looked less like a songwriting session and more like a detective’s evidence wall. Move a note, swap a genre, watch a shut-in become a punk-like song and a heartbroken groom become a ballad.

Then he sent it out into the world and let some serious talent fingerprint it. The record was co-produced in Montreal with Kid Koala — celebrated turntablist, producer and one-third of Deltron 3030 — who cut tracks to vinyl, scratched them back in and ran everything through vintage drum machines until the songs had a lived-in crackle. Mark Glick of AJJ added cello. Matt Pence (Shakey Graves, Centro-Matic) handled drums and mixing. Mastering engineer Matthew Barnhart, whose credits span records by the Mountain Goats, Superchunk and the New Pornographers, brought it home. The result swings between stripped-down piano confessions and high-energy, theatrical indie-pop with a driving locomotion rhythm.

Michener is painfully aware that “Denton weird” can curdle into shtick if you’re not careful. It keeps him honest.

“I have to make the music good, or it is all just a gimmick,” he says.

He needn’t worry. The album lands its emotional gut-punches precisely because the quirk earns them. By the time you reach the closing benediction of, “If you tell someone they’re brave and you look them in the eye, do not be surprised when one day you look to find their courage multiplied,” the whole record snaps into focus. It’s more than a concept album about neighbors; It’s a working theory of how kindness compounds.

“Bravest Neighbor” is available to purchase directly from Fishboy’s official site.