WILMINGTON — At a recent Fruition sound check, the five-piece Americana band ran through three new numbers — one from each of its principal songwriters and singers. For more than 15 years, Jay Cobb Anderson, Mimi Naja and Kellen Asebroek have been weaving their talents together, complementing each other’s melodic and lyrical ideas with vocal harmonies, fiery guitar solos, plucked mandolin strings and tickled ivories.
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“It’s not hard for us to create and come up with music and arrange it on the road,” Anderson explained.
The group is coming through Wilmington’s Live Oak Bank Pavilion on Sunday, Aug. 31, with headliner CAAMP.
The ease with which Fruition works is a product of a common musical and creative language that’s been developed over almost two decades. It’s a boon for the string band that started busking on street corners in 2008 but has now spread out to disparate corners of the country as the sound has evolved.
For years, the members of Fruition lived together — or just down the street from one another — in Portland, Oregon, a place they still fondly claim. Today, they take up residence in Atlanta, Brooklyn, Seattle, Pittsburgh and Vermont, a reality that’s “been a constant lesson and learning process of how to make it work,” Asebroek said. There’s a weekly band call, “and for the most part, we have [tour] dates on the calendar that make it so that we’re never apart for too, too long.”
“When we used to all live in the same place, we would get off the road and kind of scatter,” Naja said. “Now it kind of has that reverse psychology of when we’re apart, we’re f***ing apart. I think that it enhances our togetherness.”
Fruition pen stick-in-your-head songs that fuse folk, rock, soul and pop elements. Featuring electric and acoustic guitars, Naja provides brilliant flashes of mandolin, while Asebroek frequently mans the piano or organ and Anderson sometimes offers a touch of harmonica or pedal steel. It’s all buttressed by the solid playing of bassist Jeff Leonard and drummer Tyler Thompson.
Coupled with a spirited stage presence, the quintet has garnered a dedicated fan base who dub themselves “Fruity Freaks.”
After the pandemic, the members of Fruition weren’t necessarily sure what the future held for them. The trio hadn’t performed together for a year during Covid-19, according to Anderson. He was in his own head, questioning if they still had anything to say. Upon their eventual reunited front, a familiar immediate connection arose.
Fruition’s catalogue is full of tunes that will transport the listener to places or moments of jubilation and sorrow. There’s plenty of love lost and won alongside drinking with friends and reflecting on the meaning of life. The group’s latest album, 2024’s “How To Make Mistakes,” covers this terrain.
On a recent single, the Hammond organ-laden rocker “Whole World of Trouble,” Anderson asks:
“What are we doing to the earth?
“What are we doing to each other?
“If we don’t start stopping all the madness we’re making,
“We’re headed for a whole world of trouble”
“We’re never gonna make it if we keep seeing each other as separate rather than one people,” he writes in the track’s liner notes. “Compromise, understanding and love is the only path to victory — or else we’re all headed for a whole world of trouble.”
“Love is such a central part of the whole thing,” Asebroek said, but it can manifest in a song in different ways, like “being frustrated at an oppressive government regime. The reason that you feel compelled to sing about that is because you love your brothers and sisters, and you don’t want people to be held down.”
The band might be the tightest, most congruous and mature it’s ever been. It’s heard on the aptly titled “How To Make Mistakes,” the group’s only live-in-the-studio album. Recorded as a full band with no overdubs or sonic inconsistencies on the sentimental, this less-is-more effort rings as authentic and honest, not jarring. Similarly cohesive, the energetic 13-track “Live, Vol. 1,” recorded in Boise, Idaho, in 2019, documents the band’s rowdy performance prowess.
But what about those three new songs (one of which features the opening line of “F*** Elon Musk, Zuckerberg too”) from sound check? More seemingly similar to a band practice, it turns out the group has never played the songs together before.
“Yeah, in like half-an-hour we have 15 minutes of new material, just ready,” Naja said.
This ability to workshop songs in real time speaks to Frution’s intrinsic comfort level with one another.
“I recognize that I’m spoiled with the way that we can just [say], ‘Here’s a new song. Here’s what I was thinking. Let’s try it out.’ And it’s f***ing ready for the show,” Naja emphasized.
This high-pressure-skill honing keeps the show fresh each night, though the crowd’s enthusiastic cheers also help when Asebroek’s lyrics to Resistance Song” are sung.
“Till everyone’s cared for, nobody is free,” it closes out.
Clearly, Fruition still has plenty more to say.
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