Bonny Light Horseman–the acclaimed trio of Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman– have just announced their third full-length and Josh Kaufman, the double album Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free, will be released on June 7th, 2024. They’ve also shared lead single “I Know You Know” alongside their first-ever music video. Anchored by Mitchell and Johnson’s always-entrancing harmonies, the song demonstrates the band’s keen ability to lace emotional devastation with a pop sensibility as its feel-good, breezy arrangement and anthemic chorus belie its wrecking refrain.
“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.”
“I Know You Know” follows February’s cathartic and resonant single “When I Was Younger,” an additional album track that caught the attention of Rolling Stone (Song You Need to Know), Stereogum, Paste, Brooklyn Vegan, Relix, No Depression, Uproxx (Best New Indie), and more. Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free–produced by Kaufman and mixed by D. James Goodwin–is now available for pre-order.
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 pub Levis (pronounced: “leh-viss”) Corner House in Ballydehob, Ireland, 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. 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.
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. That’s not to say it’s a live album; instead, the third day of the Ireland sessions represented a serendipitous blend of energies because the audience implicitly understood the assignment. Patrons gave the band enough space to talk about arrangements and record multiple versions of songs, but they also provided an evident sense of environmental joy as they chatted over pints with friends and family. 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.
With Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free, Bonny Light Horseman offers a distinct sense of grace, and a reminder that life is most lived when things aren’t so perfect.