Bonny Light Horseman "Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free" 2xLP (Pink & Sky Blue)

Over the years, Bonny Light Horseman has accumulated many
miles on the collective odometer of life. The band’s core trio –
Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman – has amassed an
incomparable collected resume. Mitchell is a celebrated solo artist
as well as the playwright and songwriter behind the hit Broadway
musical Hadestown, which notched eight Tony Awards and a
Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. Johnson is best known as
the mind behind beloved indie mainstays Fruit Bats, as a longtime
collaborator with The Shins, and as a film score composer. And
Kaufman is a multi-hyphenate extraordinaire: songwriter, producer,
and position player, having recorded and performed with artists
ranging from Bob Weir to The War on Drugs to Taylor Swift, Hiss
Golden Messenger and The Hold Steady. As a group, Bonny Light
Horseman’s debut album received a Grammy nomination for Best
Folk Album, and the track "Deep in Love" was nominated for Best
American Roots Performance.

More important than any of this, though, they’ve also lived a big ol’
messy and tangled up pile of life, and all that living permeates their
music with the wisdom, humor, and depth that underlies the
accolades. Theirs is the stuff that defines folk music as a genre: love
and loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time.
The Big Stuff, with the stakes sky high.
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 that their
bond 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.

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