NELSONVILLE — Bonny Light Horseman — the trio of Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman — will headline Stuart's Opera House on June 12 in support of their new double album "Keep Me On Your Mind"/"See You Free," which is out June 7 via Jagjaguwar.
The concert will be held at 8 p.m. June 12 at the facility, 52 Public Square, Nelsonville. Tickets are $30 for balcony seats and $37 for floor seats. They can be purchased online at tixr.com/groups/stuartsoperahouse/events/bonny-light-horseman-95064 .
"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 of love and loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time all permeate the American folk band's newest offering.
The title song, "Keep Me on Your Mind," features etherial background music that evokes a light and carefree vibe. The vocals, which Mitchell shares with her bandmate, intertwine like a couple that yearns for each other but are painfully separating.
"Lover Take it Easy" looks at young love, and includes lines like "Know that you can feel me everywhere you go." Like "I Know You Know" and other songs on the double album, it's a catchy tune that listeners should dance or clap along to the rhythm.
While the band is considered a folk band, the album explores different styles and includes electric guitar solos that give some songs more of a rock vibe and brass instruments for a more rhythm and blue feel. And it's done successful as an enhancement to the song's lyrics.
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.
On a practical level, the “blessed mess” of the double album shows up in its fidelity to this home, as crowd noise, laughter, coughing, and field recordings (“Think of the royalties, lads!”) convey everything from this special place in time. But philosophically, the “mess” is evidence of the imperfect, soul-nourishing fruit born of a communal experience that transforms its participants through the spirit of good company.
The double LP contains 18 songs across two discs. It also meant two titles, if not precisely two distinct records. "Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free" 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 Levis' main room. 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 started.
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