Saddle up as the American folk trio talk us through their recorded highlights: “We all have space…”

a very ‘Yes, and…’ kind of band,” says Josh Kaufman, one-third of Bonny Light Horseman. “That’s how we like to work. I may not know where we’re going with something, but I’m going to say yes to my comrades and just see what happens. It really helps us to not

“WE’RE build too many walls around the band.” In just a few short years the trio – which also includes Anaïs Mitchell and Eric D Johnson – have said yes a lot. They barely knew each other when they agreed to perform a collaborative set at Justin Vernon’s Eaux Claires festival in 2018, after which they decamped to Berlin to record an album for 37d03d, the art collective run by Vernon and The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner. They said yes to a quick follow-up, then said yes to a new double album, Keep Me On Your Mind/See You Free. Each member brings their own set of experiences to Bonny Light: Kaufman is a multi-instrumentalist who works with Hiss Golden Messenger, Josh Ritter and The War On Drugs; Johnson is a 20-year veteran of the roots-pop band Fruit Bats, while Mitchell has spent the last 18 years shepherding Hadestown from a small stage in Vermont to the West End. “When we started doing it, it really hit at the right time for all three of us,” says Johnson. “It allows us to be free in this project in ways that we might be in our other projects. We all have space within Bonny Light.”

STEPHEN DEUSNER

BonnyLight Horseman,2024: (l–r) Josh Kaufman, EricDJohnsonand AnaïsMitchell

ANAÏS MITCHELL HADESTOWN

(WILDERLAND/RIGHTEOUS BABE, 2010)

Mitchell recruited some famous friends – Ani diFranco, Justin Vernon – for this first sketch of what became her Tony-winning Broadway musical, which resets the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in an American mining town MITCHELL: The stars aligned for this record. It took so much effort on the part of so many people, but there was also a kind of effortless grace to it. I’d been working on the show for a couple of years by then. I’d done a stage show in 2006 and another in 2007, then I rewrote a lot of stuff and added a lot of stuff. So this was maybe the third draft. We cast Ani as Persephone, which was more than I had dreamed of, but I was still hunting for an Orpheus. I’d asked a bunch of people who said no. Then Justin asked me to open a tour for the first Bon Iver record. I heard him sing that first night and was like, ‘Fuck! It has to be this guy!’ I’m so glad he said yes. I kept working on the show for years – I made some edits for the show that just opened in London’s West End and I still try to be involved in casting, which is an ongoing thing. I’m very proud of what it’s become as a theatre piece, but this record to me is still so pure. It presents the music and the characters and the songs apart from the demands of the stage. People always ask if it was unfinished, but I think it was finished for what it was. Even though the Broadway cast recording is twice as long, there’s still this finished quality to this first recording.