FOLK SUPERGROUP BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN GET BACK IN THE SADDLE
“We’re making it our own.” ANAÏS MITCHELL
IN LATE January 2020, the singer, songwriter, and playwright Anaïs Mitchell climbed into a Seattle cab to catch an early-morning flight when she realised that her year – and the world’s, for that matter – was about to change. Two days before, her new trio, Bonny Light Horseman, had released its exquisite self-titled debut – MOJO’s Folk Album Of 2020 – then ended the first brief leg of a Stateside tour ahead of a planned jaunt overseas for a few sets. But on the radio, she learned that the city’s first Covid-19 case had arrived through the very airport where she was headed. “I’m so grateful we had that tour, right under the wire,” she remembers. “We finished it, and then it was, ‘And, scene.’”
Like most every band or thing this year, Bonny Light Horseman scrapped subsequent tour dates and even plans to record a follow-up album. But nearly nine months since Mitchell, Eric D Johnson, and Josh Kaufman were in the same room, their enthusiasm for the project – which reimagines the texts of centuries-old English and American folk standards through arrangements that are graceful, subtle, and sophisticated – remains undiminished.
In fact, Johnson, who has long recorded as Fruit Bats, nearly rented an RV to drive across the country from California to Vermont to record there with Mitchell and Kaufman. The logistics proved to be too much. “Even just hearing their voices on the phone right now, I realise, ‘Oh man, I want to make music with these people,” says Kaufman, the multi-instrumentalist whose credits range from Bob Weir to Taylor Swift. “Our commitment to more music is really strong.”
Adaptability, though, is encoded into
Bonny Light Horseman’s origin story. In 2018, the three had only toyed with material and the idea of starting a group, when an invitation arrived to perform at Eaux Claires, the festival belonging to Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner. When they climbed on stage months later in Wisconsin for the first time, they still didn’t have a name. “It sounds really scary to do a big show on a big stage with songs you just wrote yesterday,” says Johnson. “But I wasn’t nervous at all, because it was a threeperson band where everyone was awesome.”
That trust imbues the 10 songs of their self-titled album, rich with harmonies on their imaginative and subversive rendering of Blackwaterside, or deep in wistfulness on their take on Lowlands Away. Friends stop by, too – saxophonist Mike Lewis adds spectral lines to Magpie Nest, while Vernon leads the yearning spiritual Bright Morning Stars as a call-and-response plea. “These songs were the right vehicle for those friendships,” says Mitchell. “We’re making it our own, but we’re never going to own it.”
Grayson Haver Currin