Keep Me On Your Mind

Bonny Light Horseman, the acclaimed trio of Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D Johnson, and Josh Kaufman, have announced their 3rd 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.

Written over 5 months in 2023, this 3rd album began when the band’s core trio convened in the century old pub Levis Corner House in Ballydehob, Ireland, alongside collaborators JT Bates on drums, Cameron Ralston on bass, and recording engineer Bella Blasko. Mitchell suggested the pub as their 1st 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 album, 18 songs across 2 discs. It also meant 2 titles, if not precisely 2 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 2 days working alone. On the evening of the 3rd, 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 1st 2 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.