Bonny Light Horseman have announced their new album and Jagjaguwar debut, 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. The trio includes Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman.

“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.”

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.

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.

Bonny Light Horseman
Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free LP
Tracklist
Jgjaguwar

1. Keep Me on Your Mind
2. Lover Take It Easy
3. I Know You Know
4. grinch/funeral
5. Old Dutch
6. When I Was Younger
7. Waiting and Waiting
8. Hare and Hound
9. Rock the Cradle
10. Singing to the Mandolin
11. The Clover
12. Into the O
13. Don’t Know Why You Move Me
14. Speak to Me Muse
15. think of the royalties, lads
16. Tumblin Down
17. I Wanna Be Where You Are
18. Over the Pass
19. Your Arms (All the Time)
20. See You Free

Pre-order Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free HERE