Photo: Kaja Sigvalda

***

Jay Cobb Anderson had a secret agenda when Fruition started recording their first album in almost five years, How to Make Mistakes. “When we went into the studio, we didn’t know what was going to happen,” the singer/guitarist/harmonica player admits. “We had 17 tracks that we wanted to record, but we hadn’t really discussed our process or which songs we were gonna hit. I was a little sneaky about my motive and really wanted to do it all live, though I hadn’t talked to the band about that yet.”

 As he thinks back on the sessions for How to Make Mistakes, which the members of his Portland, Ore.-bred band tracked in Colorado in 2023, Anderson is sitting on the beach in Hawaii while on a family vacation. It’s a few days after Thanksgiving and the 41-year-old musician is enjoying a short break before he regroups with the rest of the combo—fellow vocalists/string players Kellen Asebroek and Mimi Naja, drummer Tyler Thompson and bassist Jeff Leonard— for some end-of-year festivities that will culminate with two big dates supporting Greensky Bluegrass in Denver.

The quintet is currently in the midst of a creative burst. Despite still promoting How to Make Mistakes, which they self-released in late August, the members of the group are already deep into their next LP. And, although they were in the midst of a promo campaign for their record, they made the unorthodox decision to drop the timely new non-album single “Whole World of Trouble” right before the election.

“We recorded that one in Portland, Maine, while we were on tour,” says Anderson, the song’s author. “I was in the middle of a doomscroll one day, and there was so much craziness happening in the world and so much divisiveness. It’s not a partisan song—it’s a call for people to wake up, be a little more conscious and think about living together more than apart. Mimi was the one who said we should record and release it before the election. We found a studio on the road and used our day off to bust it out.”

“Jay’s so good at voicing real talk without making anybody feel like an outcast,” the 37-year-old Naja says a day later, as she prepares for her first ever round of golf with some friends in Georgia. “There’s a unifying energy. That song inspired me to work a little harder on expressing not explicitly political things per se, but different social ideas—to get out of the personal writing and not write so much just about my life. We’re trying to look at the greater demographic and where we are in the world right now. We’re trying to shine a light on those types of things.”

While a similar in-the-moment spirit guided Fruition early on, it had been a while since they had aimed to channel the freeform vibe of their younger years during a proper studio situation. So when the band started tracking How to Make Mistakes, Anderson quickly realized that they needed to harness the energy of their concerts. He was feeling particularly confident in the approach too, jazzed by the three albums he and Thompson—who often lends his services as an engineer—had recorded with their other band, the psychedelic-county act TK & The Holy Know-Nothings.

“I wanted to push the band to record all 17 songs,” Anderson says. “I brought it up after the first day: ‘If we want to track them all, then we need to do it live.’ Everyone was like, ‘I don’t know about that.’ But we banged out a couple of tracks the second day and, at that point, people started feeling that same vibe. And that’s when Mimi singled out a lyric that became the perfect title—‘how to make mistakes’—from the song “Made to Break,” which me and her co-wrote. She’s like, ‘If we do it live, we can call it How to Make Mistakes and keep it raw.’ We all just instantly agreed on that. It was one of those beautiful, perfect-storm moments that you always hope for with music.”

“It had been so long since we’d been in the studio that we wanted to bang out as many songs as we possibly could,” Naja says. “That ended up creating the entire energy of the record and making it very cohesive.”

However, those seemingly idyllic, “perfect-storm moments” arrived after a long few years, when the members of Fruition found themselves both questioning their next steps as a band and navigating a mix of personal changes in the face of the global pandemic.

“We lost a ton of the momentum that we had been building before that, as many people did,” the 38-year-old Asebroek says of the aftermath of COVID, while calling from California in early December, where he is visiting family for the holidays. “But, at the same time, we were mature enough and adventurous enough—and ambitious enough when we got back into the studio—to trust each other’s skills, tastes and decision-making abilities. We were able to communicate.”

“The whole pandemic break was a time for everyone on the planet to get a bird’s eye view of their life and path,” Naja says. “It was really healthy to evaluate and recalibrate. There were some days during that period where it was like, ‘Is this coming back? Are we a band? Should we be a band? Do we believe in this music?’ That answer was always, ‘Yes,’ thank God, but it ended up taking longer than we wanted.”

In 2022, Anderson, Asebroek and Naja— co-founding members of the group and the project’s primary songwriters—hit the road as a stripped-down trio, eager to try out some new material and revisit their songbook after a trying few years. Their decision to beta test some ideas in front of a live audience in a more intimate setting also alleviated some pressure on Thompson and Leonard, who were both new fathers.

“They’ve never intended to not be touring musicians, that’s what they’re gonna do,” Naja says. “But with the age of the kids at that time, it was really nice for us to be able to keep the Fruition name alive and keep working toward the greater goal without those guys having to leave home.”

“The trio tour really fostered that collaborative spirit for us, as the songwriters, allowing us to open up ourselves to revisions and edits,” Asebroek adds. “It was a shared process, like The Beatles, where one person might bring in a verse and we’ll work on it together. To me, that’s greater than the sum of its parts. The next chapter in our story are these collaborative writing experiments.”

There were some other practical reasons to hit the road as well.

“A big part of it was getting enough material together to get into the studio because we all live in separate cities so we isolated away from each other during the pandemic,” Anderson says. “With our drummer and bassist wanting some paternity leave and us rearing to go, everything just kind of came together for that.”

Fruition’s diaspora began before the pandemic, as the individual members of the project slowly started leaving Portland for a variety of personal reasons. Now, the group is spread out in five different geographic areas: Thompson is in Pittsburgh, Naja has returned to Atlanta, Asebroek resides in Brooklyn, N.Y., Leonard is based in Vermont and Anderson is still representing the Pacific Northwest in Seattle.

“It just happened naturally,” Anderson says. “Mostly for partners and life.”

The trio tour ended up both helping the members of Fruition workshop some new ideas and reinforcing their creative bond, influencing How to Make Mistakes’ overall collaborative ethos.

“It’s a natural progression,” Asebroek says. “We needed to come back together, rejoice and walk in each other’s shoes— embrace each other physically, musically and artistically. It’s about growing up, trying to kill your ego and letting go of some of that perceived—maybe rightly perceived— ownership of your art.”

“Initially, when we got together as a band, it was always very separate, though we’d arrange things together,” Anderson says, echoing his bandmate’s thoughts. “But as we’ve gotten older, we’ve gotten to know each other more and become really good friends—family. Songwriting is a vulnerable thing and you have to be able to have a sense of trust to put yourself out there and know that your feelings might get hurt, but that it’s coming from a place that’s about the benefit of the song. We couldn’t have done that when we first started because we were just young and immature. So the maturity that we have now that we’re older is the real reason why I feel like we’ve been able to dig into more co-writing. We’ve been a band for 16 years. We trust each other. We’re willing to be vulnerable with each other. We’ve been through a lot of shit together.”

The Great Pause also allowed the five musicians to reevaluate their lives off the stage and outside the studio. Several members of Fruition made some important life change during that time, including Naja, who realized she was struggling and entered rehab on April 4, 2020, just a few weeks into lockdown.

“I was like, ‘I gotta change,’” she says. “Of all of the horrible parts of the pandemic, it was the greatest gift to my life because I don’t think I was ever gonna get help otherwise. It would have affected other people—other people’s schedules. But during the pandemic, I didn’t have to pause anything to go into rehab. Everyone was stuck at home anyway.”

“The pandemic, for some people, was a time to shut off and, for other people, it was a time to take stock of the mistakes you’ve made or lessons you’ve learned,” Anderson adds.

Asebroek, who was one of the band’s last Portland holdouts at the time, felt quite literally boxed in at first.

“Depressingly enough, I managed to move into a weird, windowless, unfinished basement situation that I thought would be a temporary and the pandemic hit days later,” he says. “I didn’t really have options for moving out for a while. I tried to make the best of my situation. But, at the time, being a single guy who was kind of lost, it was certainly a dark situation on the surface and down below. It made me yearn for a time when I could be back in my element on the road.”

***

Fruition’s original members coalesced in Portland, Ore., in the 2000s, near the tail end of a particularly fertile period for the city’s artistic community.

“We emerged at a time when, especially in Portland, hippie culture in general was peaking,” Asebroek explains. “We were grungy, organic, almost street kids. We lived in houses, but we were pretty crunchy. So we got embraced by a similarly crunchy, organic culture.”

In 2008, Anderson moved to Portland with bassist Keith Simon, with whom he had played in bands back home in Lewiston, Idaho. While busking and playing open mics, the guitarist befriended Naja, who was working the same circuit. She knew Asebroek and the four string players began gigging out, playing everywhere from Saturday markets to brunch spots and house parties.

“Kellen and I were walking on Hawthorne with our guitars one day, and Jay was sitting in an internet café—that’ll timestamp it for you,” Naja says. “He was looking for a job because he was broke and had just moved to town. He saw us through the window and came out to ask what we were doing. We were going busking, so he was like, ‘Well, screw looking for a job. I’ll go make some money on the street right now.’ And that was that. We created a real buzz by gigging out a lot. So we’d be on the sidewalks of Hawthorne by day and in these small pubs by night.”

“We didn’t, at the time, think, ‘This is going to be my career henceforth for the rest of my life,’ but we needed to do something with this because we have like these ‘faux blood’ harmonies, almost like sibling harmonies,” Asebroek says. “We naturally settled into these three part stacks so well and so delightfully. We started playing on the streets so we would sing covers and rip solos to keep people’s attention.”

The Georgia-bred Mimi first discovered string music thanks to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the large shadow the film and its accompanying soundtrack cast, but notes that she also came to that music a bit later. “I’m from Atlanta—I listened to Outkast and the radio,” she says with a hearty laugh. “I didn’t grow up in some Appalachian old time tradition. But moving out to Oregon is what really opened our eyes to the newgrass community. I got into the farthest possible school from Georgia I could and just took a completely random chance.”

Eventually, Thompson—who knew Anderson from Idaho—ended up joining the nascent Fruition. And, when Simon parted ways with the band, he brought Leonard, an old roommate from Bremerton, Wash., into the fold.

“Jay and I never jammed before he moved to Portland because he was three and-a-half years older and playing in reggae/rock bands, I was mostly doing jazz gigs when I lived in Idaho,” the drummer says. “I moved to Bremerton in 2005 for college, where I met Jeff as my roommate. I failed my one core class and then started touring with The Clumsy Lovers in January 2006. Jeff moved to Tacoma, Wash. around 2010 and stayed there even when he joined Fruition in 2015.”

Though the group’s early instrumentation, multi-part harmonies and street performances immediately pegged them as a bluegrass band, Anderson is quick to note that, at the time, his interests swayed closer to straight-ahead rock.

“I didn’t know who Yonder Mountain String Band was,” he says. “Mimi was the one who said, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta listen to String Cheese.’ She introduced me Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings and Old Crow Medicine Show. And when I heard Old Crow, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the vibe I want—that rowdy, good-time thing.’”

Asebroek, who hails from Southern California, grew up listening to the Dead, thanks to his Deadhead father and was already familiar with the expanded jamband universe; Anderson fondly remembers his new bandmate playing him Leftover Salmon for the first time in his car during one impactful listening session. However, it was when the group volunteered at North Plains, Ore.’s Northwest String Summit which was held at Horning’s Hideout, that they were truly indoctrinated into the scene.

“We used to volunteer at the festival so we could get in for free,” Anderson says. “We’d help park cars and check IDs in the beer tent and, the entire time, we’d play guerilla shows. The first time we played there, I went to the main stage once. Our whole mentality, from the beginning of the band, was: ‘We just want to play.’ Eventually, some of our friends helped us get on the late-night stage and then, the next year, we got on the main stage, even though we’d entered the band competition two years in a row and didn’t get it. We ended up judging that competition, which is hilarious.”

Fruition gradually grew into favorites on the live-music circuit, sharing the stage with like-minded acts such as The Wood Brothers and The Infamous Stringdusters, as well as jam-adjacent entertainers like Jack Johnson. They also received accolades for their songwriter and studio efforts, including 2018’s Watching It All Fall Apart, which was produced by Portland hero Tucker Martin, known for his work with The Decemberists and My Morning Jacket, among others.

“At the risk of sounding hippie-dippie, we wanted to take people on a journey and take ourselves on a journey—keep it engaging, show where we came from and where we are at,” Asebroek says.

While dedicated to spending much of the year on the concert circuit, the musicians started to drift in different directions geographically. Naja notes that she “missed the culture of the South,” living in Asheville, N.C., and Nashville for periods of time before circling back to Atlanta.

“There’s a lot of real life things that brought me back home,” she explains. “Financial reasons and just being close to family. I turned 18, disappeared and only saw my mom and dad once a year for the bulk of my adult life.”

During the pandemic, the quintet stayed connected through weekly streams, scheduled band calls and some attempted creative sessions, yet they were unable to quarantine together like some of their peers.

“The weekly streams ended up being incredibly cathartic and therapeutic because we could perform,” Asebroek says. “We would trade around every week and a different member would stream from home. Other weeks, we’d offer a peek under the hood in some way or offer a look at someone’s studio. We also released a live album based off of some soundboards that we had.”

“Living far apart from each other worked fine pre-pandemic, but it was pretty challenging through it all,” Naja says. “It ended up being a healthy break because we came back more driven than ever.”

She also feels stronger as a songwriter, having now been sober for almost five years.

“I had a fear, like a lot of creative people do in relation to substance use,” she admits. “There’s some weird voice in your head that tells that these tools are feeding your creativity—and they can in certain ways. But, I was so grateful that my writing, once I wasn’t using anything, was much more free and clear. The muse was more direct with me than it ever was when I was using. A lot of creatives have that fear and think that they won’t be able to make cool shit. And I’m pleased to say that the voice in your head is very wrong.”

“We want to be in the best possible shape—mentally, socially and physically— and not fuck it or get fucked up,” Asebroek says. “A lot of us don’t drink anymore. We’re trying to get sleep, stay hydrated and do these things that show that we’re not just out here—that we are not taking advantage of this opportunity in the wrong ways. That dedication to the process—to the craft—has been really obvious in how we feel we are playing these new songs and how the shows have gone off. It’s tighter and more relaxed because the trust.”

They have also unlocked some doors stylistically as of late.

“Overall, this record is more relaxed than some of our past stuff. That’s been an adjustment period for the live crowd in positive and negative ways,” Naja says. “For a small number of people, the more mellow half-time stuff isn’t what they thought was coming from us. They remember us from the party. But it’s fun experimenting with the vibe.”

“The new songs show a lot of growth and a lot of introspection,” Asebroek says. “They are a little more focused on big picture life stuff than the younger, more heartbreak-focused or angst-focused kind of thing we did early on.”

***

The making of How To Make Mistakes led to a flood of new material. And, though the band has not fully mapped out its release, the musicians intend to release another album in the near future.

“We realized that we actually had enough stuff for two records when we started working,” Naja says. “So we split it up, and we have a whole other record done right now. How to Make Mistakes came first because we wanted to get into the studio and just bang things out.”

A 180-degree turn from How to Make Mistakes, their forthcoming release will make use of the studio setting, with Tucker serving as a producer.

“We wanted to dig into more of a studio album after doing this live record,” Anderson says. “I do feel like it’s going to be our best record yet.”

“We’ve done one album with him in the past where we explored different genres, layers and all kinds of rock-and-roll stuff,” Naja says. “I’m very excited about this record. It has a good indie feel to it.”

Both LPs also showcase the three primary songwriters’ abilities to share ideas and seeds of songs.

“Originally, the three writers would come to the table with their songs, which is great because it gives us some diversity in terms of the style and expression of our music,” Naja says. “But now, we’ve been able to do some serious ego shedding by working on some raw material and some unfinished things together. We’ve also done some writing together. So it’s been a really fun new era.”

However, Asebroek is candid while describing what it is like being in a mid-level band trafficking on the indie and jam circuits.

“It can be disheartening and discouraging at times, if I’m being completely honest,” Asebroek says. “We are barely making ends meet. We’re working as hard as we ever have, but we are still living paycheck to paycheck.”

Yet, after seeing how quickly all they had built could evaporate, or at least go on pause, he’s more committed than ever to his four bandmates. It’s a sentiment the entire group seems to share.

“Where the band is now, as far as musical synergy goes, is that we all take this seriously,” Asebroek says. “We always did, but it was also half about partying, maybe sleeping around and having fun—the excessive parts that could come with tour life or any kind of success or fame.”