Bonny Light Horseman, the acclaimed trio of Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman, have released their new double album Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free via Jagjaguwar.
Produced by Kaufman and mixed by D. James Goodwin, the band’s third LP is earning rave reviews worldwide, including from Uncut (9/10 stars), MOJO, New York Mag/Vulture (“Best Songs of 2024 (So Far)”), Paste, No Depression, and Exclaim!, while album singles ‘Old Dutch,’ ‘I Know You Know,’ and ‘When I Was Younger,’ earned praise and support from Rolling Stone (Song You Need to Know), Paste, Stereogum, Uproxx (Best New Indie), Brooklyn Vegan, Relix and Exclaim! among others.
Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free is an ode to the blessed mess of our humanity. Confident and generous, it is an unvarnished offering that puts every feeling and supposed flaw out in the open. The themes are stacked high and staked even higher: love and loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time all permeate Bonny Light Horseman’s most vulnerable and bounteous offering to date. Yet for all of its humanistic touchpoints, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free was forged from a kind of unexplainable magic.
Written over five months in 2023, this third album began when the band’s core trio convened in the century-old Irish pub Levis Corner House alongside beloved collaborators JT Bates (drums), Cameron Ralston (bass), and recording engineer Bella Blasko. Mitchell suggested the pub as their first recording location, based on her one conversation with owner Joe O’Leary. Stepping inside the pub’s aged confines, the trio felt an immediate connection to its palpable sense of community, and of family, forged over many decades.
Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free is sprawling and welcoming, and encompasses the group’s captivating artistic layers: its roots in the sounds and lyrical spirit of traditional folk music, its branches in a more experimental and emotionally raw version of the band. The group tracked about half of the songs in the main room of Levis’s. They spent two days working alone; on the evening of the third, O’Leary invited some enthusiastic residents to join in. The band then returned to their spiritual home, upstate New York’s Dreamland Recording Studios (where they completed their first two albums), to finish the work they had started. Frequent collaborator Mike Lewis joined on bass and tenor saxophone. Annie Nero stopped by to play upright bass and sing some harmonies for an afternoon. The days were rhapsodic and restorative, filled with crying, and songs that poured out like tears.
ANTICIPATED JAGJAGUWAR DEBUT OUT TODAY; LISTEN HERE
Bonny Light Horseman – ‘Old Dutch’
Bonny Light Horseman – ‘I Know You Know’
Bonny Light Horseman – ‘When I Was Younger’
Praise for Bonny Light Horseman:
‘Old Dutch’ – New York Mag/Vulture’s ‘Best Songs of 2024 (So Far)’
“Bonny Light Horseman packs double album with tender songs transcending time”– No Depression
“…it’s clear this is something special” – Uncut (9/10 stars)
STREAM/PURCHASE HERE
BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN
KEEP ME ON YOUR MIND/SEE YOU FREE
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