Bonny Light Horseman today shared their stirring new single ‘Old Dutch,’ an indelible tale of shifting love. The recording encapsulates the band’s experience tracking part of their forthcoming third album/double LP, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free at Levis Corner House pub in Ballydehob, Ireland, in front of a crowd of enthusiastic patrons–as seen in the song’s accompanying visualizer, which features rousing footage of the process.
“This song began as a backstage voice memo when we were performing at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, NY, so iPhone named it for us. It came together fast with the three of us just finger-painting until there it was. It took a few fits and starts before we realized that it should be a duet and–importantly–a conversation,” explains the acclaimed trio of Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman. “We recorded it live at Levis’ and when the whole crowd started singing ‘yeah I got a feelin,’ we all experienced a moment of collective lift-off. Josh looked over at Joe’s (bar owner) partner Caroline behind the bar, eyes wide open, arms outstretched, singing along and deeply feeling it. We’d never had that kind of moment tracking a song for a record before, seeing and feeling the connection (beyond the musicians in the room) in real-time as it’s all going to tape. It feels like this recording has some of that ‘real-life’ energy to it.”
Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free–produced by Kaufman and mixed by D. James Goodwin–will be released on June 7, 2024, and is available for pre-order.
‘Old Dutch’ arrives on the heels of additional album singles ‘I Know You Know,’ which caught the attention of Stereogum, Paste, Brooklyn Vegan, Relix, Exclaim!, and more, and ‘When I Was Younger,’ which earned additional praise from Rolling Stone (Song You Need to Know), Paste, No Depression, and Uproxx (Best New Indie), 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 Levis 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.
In its evolution from recording to release, this meant compiling a double LP—eighteen songs across two discs. It also meant two titles, if not precisely two distinct records. 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.
Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free
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