Making Fans Has Always Come Easy for Fruition. It's Getting Everyone Else's Attention That's Been a Challenge

It shouldn't have been so hard for Fruition to play the Northwest String Summit.

With its bluegrass-indebted folk sound, you'd think the band would make an ideal fit for Portland's crunchiest roots-focused music festival. But after getting shut out two years in a row, the group decided to take matters into its own mandolins.

"We were determined to make our own party there somehow," says singer-guitarist Jay Cobb Anderson. "One of our friends brought a generator to the campsite. So late night, we set up a whole P.A. system and all our equipment. We got three or four songs deep before Bob Horning, who runs the place, came up rolling up on his four wheeler and shut us down. But he also liked what he heard."

Two years later, Fruition played the main stage—and they're coming back this year.

That's kind of how it's always gone for the band. At this point, it's no great stretch to call the quintet Portland's most popular Americana ensemble. It has sold out venues as large as Revolution Hall, toured with some of the major names in modern roots music, and are about to headline two nights at Wonder Ballroom. But you wouldn't know that from reading this paper, or any other in town—unless you picked up the results of WW's Best of Portland Readers Poll last year, where the group was voted the city's Best Alt-Country Band. Nor would you know from attending Pickathon, which the band has all but given up on ever being invited to.

None of this has left the members of Fruition particularly aggrieved. They understand the stigma of being a 21st century string band, even though their sound—warm and historically informed, closer to the Band than the Lumineers—defies a lot of those preconceived biases. And anyway, they're doing just fine without the institutional support of the music scene at large.

At the same time, Fruition has never fully seen itself as a traditional "string band," an "alt-country band" or even really a "folk band." It's always preferred a broader term: rock band. With new album Labor of Love, the group is making a concerted effort to expand its reach, drawing from a wider palette of influences, from soul to pop, and nudging the volume upward. It's not about distancing themselves from the labels already ascribed to them. It's about making other people see them for the kind of band they've always thought they were.

"I feel like labels matter to other people," says Mimi Naja, who plays guitar and mandolin, "so if it's going to keep mattering to other people, then yes, I want to be called a rock band."

If Fruition hasn't always sounded exactly like a rock band, that was mostly out of necessity. Cobb, Naja and Kellen Asebroek started out in 2008 as a busking trio, harmonizing Bob Marley songs and gospel standards along Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. As they've moved off the street and into increasingly bigger rooms, their sound—and ambition—has grown, too. But even after recruiting a rhythm section, bassist Jeff Leonard and drummer Tyler Thompson, three years ago, the band struggled to capture the energy that's made it such a popular live draw on record.

"We've always wanted to make, and have been trying to make, a record that represents what we're doing live," Asebroek says, "and that is hard to do in the studio."

For Labor of Love, the band took the time get it right—two years, in fact. Integrating electric guitars and humming organs among plucky banjos and stirring three-part harmonies, the result is the band's most broadly appealing effort yet. There are traces of classic soul in "Above the Line" and "Santa Fe" and springy indie-pop in "Fallin' On My Face." "The Way That I Do" rides a Cajun shuffle, while "Early Morning Wake Up" drifts through an almost psychedelic fog. The hope, the band admits, is that it'll open them up to a larger audience, and maybe change a few perceptions. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but it's certainly made them harder to keep ignoring them.

Of course, the flipside is that it could alienate the fanbase that's always been there. So far, though, that hasn't happened. And even if it does, well, perhaps that's for the better.

"I think there's been more people that have latched on than have dropped off," Cobb says. "And the ones that drop off, it's like, good riddance, then."

SEE IT: Fruition plays Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., on Friday-Saturday, April 22-23. 8 pm. $17 advance, $20 day of show, $30 two-day pass. 21+.

Willamette Week