And with their first-ever video a double album!
Bonny Light Horseman – the acclaimed trio of Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman – have announced their third full-length and Jagjaguwar record label debut, the double album “Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free”, which will be released on June 7th 2024. They’ve also shared lead single ‘I Know You Know’ alongside their first-ever music video which you can watch below.
“When thinking about directors for Bonny Light Horseman’s first (!!!) ever music video, Kimberly Stuckwisch leapt to mind immediately. I’d been a longtime fan of her always-evocative work–and for our band I felt like she’d ‘get it,’” explains Johnson. “The treatment she came back with was deeply aligned with the sentiments of the song: life’s multiverse, the dualities of joy and pain, the choices we make that chart our course towards one way or another. We shot this on a salt flat in the Mojave desert, trying to outrun the sunset and packs of salty coyotes, under the watch of some wayward desert pelicans.”
Written over five months in 2023, this third album began when the band’s core trio convened in the century-old pub Levis (pronounced: “leh-viss”) Corner House in Ballydehob, Ireland, alongside 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. The pub’s upright piano, which they lubricated with olive oil to quiet its creaking, became a fulcrum, a single entity that embodied all of the album’s motifs: “imperfection as a badge of honour; ageing, endurance and the passage of time; how the simplest of acts can heal us.”
In its evolution from recording to release, the amount of material 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 encompasses the group’s 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 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.
“Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free”–produced by Kaufman and mixed by D. James Goodwin–is now available for pre-order here.
“Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free” LP Tracklist:
1. Keep Me on Your Mind
2. Lover Take It Easy
3. I Know You Know
4. grinch/funeral
5. Old Dutch
6. When I Was Younger
7. Waiting and Waiting
8. Hare and Hound
9. Rock the Cradle
10. Singing to the Mandolin
11. The Clover
12. Into the O
13. Don’t Know Why You Move Me
14. Speak to Me Muse
15. Think of the royalties, lads
16. Tumblin Down
17. I Wanna Be Where You Are
18. Over the Pass
19. Your Arms (All the Time)
20. See You Free
