Bonny Light Horseman’s new album, 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–Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman–convened in an Irish pub 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. She had a feeling about the place, and was surprised by her bandmates’ enthusiasm for the idea. 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 was Levis (pronounced: “leh-viss”) Corner House, a century-old watering hole in Ballydehob, a tiny coastal village in County Cork, and its energy became a singular source of Bonny Light Horseman’s creative engine. The pub’s upright piano, which they lubricated with olive oil to quiet its creaking, became a sort of spiritual fulcrum, a single entity that embodied all of the album’s motifs: imperfection as a badge of honor; aging, endurance and the passage of time; how the simplest of acts can heal us. The analogs–between this century-old meeting place of local folk and this trio of American folkies–were undeniable. “It has this sense of history; it’s also small, and crammed with a bunch of stuff that’s spilling all over the place,” says Kaufman. “It was like the pub version of our band.” A painting that hung on a wall of the pub, which watched over the band during their time working, became the album cover. “I was making eye contact with that person for most of the recording,” Johnson said of the artwork. And there was a deeper connection. Before the band had even planned to record in the pub, the owner’s wife had named the woman in the painting Bonnie.
There’s magic in a place like Levis Corner House, yes, but it takes the right wizards to wield it. At the center of Bonny Light Horseman is, always, the singular combination of three powerful and tender artists–artists who expertly dodge superlatives but are quick to acknowledge the ways they strengthen and enrich one another, and the bond that makes each one better, braver and more vulnerable than they’d be on their own. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the force of their voices together, which work with complete trust in one another through the gentlest moments and the most ruthless wails. The result can comfort and cradle listeners, but also leaves them rattled, wrecked, and reborn.
