Bonny Light Horseman on Finding Common Ground, Recording in Pubs, and the Struggles of Parenthood
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At this point it's totally fair to refer to Bonny Light Horseman as one of the decade's most surprising success stories: The folk-rock supergroup's self-titled 2020 record was one of the year's finest period, and their third album Keep Me on Your Mind/Set You Free from this year found the powerhouse trio of Anaïs Mitchell, Josh Kaufman, and Eric D. Johnson expanding their sound even further as they continue to journey into original songwriting. I've been a big fan across the 2020s, and it was a pure pleasure to talk to Anaïs and Josh about all things BLH as well as about the scope of their careers thus far.
As individuals, you're no strangers to writing songs—but this project initially started as a way to re-contextualize already-established folk traditionals. You're now two albums into writing original Bonny Light Horseman material. How is that feeling?
Josh: At this point, we're feeling pretty comfortable. That said, there was a way that we went at those traditional songs where we were looking for something personal in them from the get. Now, it does feel like we're able to mind-meld our worlds in a cohesive way. This last record's songs are more in conversation with each other than on Rolling Golden Holy, There's elements of all of us in the way those songs are put together as well, but this last one does feel like more of an arrival in terms of the way the three of us can write together. Hopefully, that will continue to evolve. We never stay put—in fact, I'd love to keep changing around the center we have that's really strong, and to do what we do naturally together. I'm just excited to make another record, honestly. I get pretty restless, so that's usually the first thing I say when we're done.
Anaïs: We're having so much fun in the studio and playing this stuff live. I love this band so much. It's really been a blessing. We all have other stuff going on, but this has taken a larger space than I understood it would when we first started making music together. But it still has side-project energy, you know? It's able to flourish in the shadow in this unpressurized way, and I love that.
Let's talk more about the success of this band taking you guys by surprise. When I first heard the first album, I felt lucky enough that it existed, and I hoped people would catch on to it in a greater way. Sometimes you get a record like that and it really is a one-time deal—but here we are near the end of 2024, and the band is going stronger than ever. What was your guys' own perception as far as how that first record caught on?
It was such a surprise. It came out in January 2020, and we did a release tour of just a few weeks. I was about to have a kid, so we didn't have a lot planned on our schedule—which turned out to be a good thing, because the world shut down right after the record came out. I think a lot of people found that album in a crazy rare headspace, where music was a life raft—I have records that were that way for me during that time—so it felt really special that it was able to be a balm for some people. I mean, it starts with a minute of out-of-tune guitar music—British Isles folk text. How did this catch on? I don't know why it connected, but I'm so grateful for it, and we felt it ourselves. Even without, like, the Grammy noms or whatever, we felt it was special to us, and we would've kept going anyway—but it was heartening that it was also meaningful to other people.
Josh: To speak to the minute of out-of-tune guitar music: That's true of all of our records.That's how they all start, and it's my favorite kind of music.
Talk to me more about how the atmosphere within the band has changed when it comes to songwriting. You have three distinct voices in the mix—what's that like now?
I don't know that we've yet found a template in which we make stuff. There are times where each of us will maybe bring in an idea that gets filtered through all three of us in various ways, and we look forward to seeing how it's going to end up—and then sometimes we just get together, and there's a word, a chord, or a conversation, and we just jam and that turns into a song too. It just needs to be this game of telephone for the three of us, and then we end up with something that sounds like us. There have been a couple times where we've ended up with something that we didn't fully cook all the way because it didn't sound like us. There's a song for the last record that we kept going back to.
Anaïs: It's a really good song! We gotta finish that one.
Josh: Right, it's cool, but it's not there.
Anaïs: It sounded like a War on Drugs song or something. There is still a sense of wanting to make songs that live in conversation with the trad—a little bit of love and theft. The safety in numbers of the three of us writing these things, as well as the fact that they are in conversation with the trad, almost makes it safer to be really vulnerable and real. Writing songs is personal, and there's some way in which it's almost easier to be honest, get on a mic, and emote a thing if it's not just one of you. It's not like, "This is my statement," but, "We're gonna all stand in this song."
When we were mixing the record, I was driving in the van with my whole family—my partner, my kids, my dad, and my mom—and my dad was like, "Play some of the new Bonny Light." I put on "When I Was Younger," which is a really intense song about midlife domestic frustration, and my dad goes, "So who wrote that one?" And I was like, "Well, we co-write them." And that one is sort of based on the trad, because there is a whole genre of trad songs that are about that. There was some way in which I felt safe, you know what I mean? But of course, all those feelings are real for all of us.
How do you guys manage creative disagreement?
Josh: When there's a creative conflict or disagreement, I find that it usually means that something isn't quite in the right spot, and we end up just needing to work on it more. Do you feel like that's accurate?
Anaïs: Yeah.
Josh: If we disagree on something, it's not like, "Okay, now we're gonna go use your idea because I'm gonna give up." It's more like, "Okay, if it's not working for you, then it must not be working right, so let's keep figuring this out." There's a little moment of, "Oh shit, I'm slightly butthurt about this because I like it, but never mind. Let's keep moving through it. This is probably going to be cooler." And it always is. Even down to our album title, after we recorded "Keep Me on Your Mind," we were listening to the playback and I was like, "The fucking album title done." Anaïs was like, "I think so," but Eric wasn't ready to commit yet. At the end of listening to mixes, he was like, "The record's called See You Free, I'll go to my grave over it."
Anaïs: It's good he's not on this call. [Laughs] He literally said, "I'll go to my grave knowing that this album should have been called that."
Josh: But then we were on a call and supposed to turn in the record, and Anaïs suggested, "It's both." And this is a double record, and every one of these songs is actually a version of either of those songs. Even the order of those ideas is like a beautiful send-off. So that's an example of when we disagreed about something big creatively, but we figured out how to how to team up on it in a big way at the end. It doesn't need to always be cheery, but we enter conflicts and hopefully leave them as a better band.
Anaïs: There is a lot less conflict in this band than I'd expect. I'd expect a lot more arm wrestling going on than there is. There's things that you can't live without, and Eric couldn't live without that title, and we knew it. Then there's a hundred things where it's like, "I like that line, but I can live without it in service to what this thing is becoming. Let's be zen about it and let these things go." But it's also about understanding and identifying when I can't let that go for whatever reason, and I feel like we're all pretty sensitive to when those moments happen for someone.
It's such a very specific statement to do a double album these days, because the definition of an album is so fluid to begin with.
Anaïs: When we made the second record, we kept on saying we wanted it to spill all over—we wanted it to be rhapsodic and big, like everything was coming out and gushing everywhere. That record ended up more concise than I wanted it to be—it was about the songs and the way we recorded it. So this one felt like our chance to spill all over, and that's just what happened. We didn't intend to make a double record—we just started tracking, and the songs kept coming and we were like, "They gotta live together."
A lot of it was recorded live in this beautiful, old, weird community pub in West Cork in Ireland, and there's a sprawliness to that whole pub that made us be like, "Let's just keep going." Someone in an interview we did yesterday described it as a lock-in. In Ireland, it gets to be closing time for the pubs, but if people are still drinking and playing music, they'll lock the doors and pour pints, but it's off the record. This guy described our session as a three-day lock-in, which is exactly what it was. It felt like all of these things were pointing to this epic, sprawl-y conversation—a feast, which was a word that came to us a lot. Let's just keep talking and have another round.
Josh: It'd go late, and the bar owner Joe O'Leary took us in, his friend came over, and he cooked this incredible meal for us, and we met some of their friends and family at this long supper table. It was a big feast, and it felt symbolic of why we were there too. The songs just kept coming, and they all seemed to be from the same mess of our lives at the at the moment—the good mess and the difficult mess. It's all in there. They didn't feel like they wanted to be separated. You can always say, "We're going to use 12 of these songs for the LP and we'll park the others for some sort of promotional release later in the cycle," but it didn't feel appropriate. It felt like they all lived together and breathed the same air, so they just live on this double album.
I'm curious to hear you guys talk more about recording an album live in that way. It seems like the stakes would be higher than your usual recording setup.
Anaïs: I think you can hear the stakes. 95% of what we put on the record came from the final moment in the final show, where there's people in the room. There was a palpable energy you could hear, and we'd never shared the songs with anyone before, so we were recording and sharing them for the first time. The people were singing with us, but it also wasn't a performance. There's some footage of it—I forgot there was a camera in there—and it's not a front-facing performance. I remember thinking in the middle of it, "I have to not worry about what my face is doing." All that matters is what is gonna come out on the other end of the tape. It didn't feel presentational. It was like a ritual.
Josh: We were sitting around in the center of this bar for a few days, and on the evening of the third day, when Joe had invited friends and people who live nearby to come hang out and listen to the music, Eric did this awesome thing where he spoke to everybody and was like, "This isn't necessarily a concert. We might play things more than once—it's almost like a weird installation piece. You're watching us in our natural environment." That was helpful, and it did a lot for the feeling in the room. It made it feel homey, but it also gave us some creative boundary to say, "We might screw up or decide to do it in a different key. We might play the song again. We'll have those conversations with each other, and maybe with you too." All of that happened in a fun way. It didn't feel like a put-on, it didn't feel gimmicky. It just felt like we were trying these things out.
Going into that recording week, I think I said, "If we get two or three songs out of this, I'll be really psyched." It's like growing stuff in the garden. If we get a couple tomatoes, I'm gonna be stoked. It doesn't even have to taste good. So if some stuff comes up, you're like, "Oh wow, this is amazing." Listening back, Anaïs was saying you could really feel the humanity in there, and that's a special thing to share with people and to be reminded of within yourself, too.
Anaïs: Josh, do you remember that right before we started, someone spilled a whole glass of red wine on me?
Josh: I don't.
Anaïs: Luckily, I was wearing a black dress. But it was right when we were starting, and that energy never stopped for me.
Josh: I must have been futzing with mics or something
Tell me more about he specificity of recording spaces you've worked in. The sound itself of your records seems to be as essential to their success as the songwriting itself, which is not always the case with music in general. Talk to me about what feels right in spaces—and what feels wrong, as well.
Josh: We all take the temperature of a space and know whether it's our vibe. To me, that's the most important thing, more than how something would sonically sound. On some records that I work on, we have to go to this specific place because we need isolation. For this band, everybody sounds good mixing themselves in the room. For me, I want as much leakage as possible. If I was to show you these sessions, when I open up Anaïs' guitar mic, it's got just as much snare drum in it as it does her vocal, as it does my guitar and Eric's banjo. Everything is everything. You can pan it around and it almost envelopes you in this unpredictable way. Frequencies are bouncing in and out of everybody's microphones, which is a fun way to think about it.
I'm not really that scared of any space, as long as everybody is comfortable and feels like they have what they need. It doesn't have to be a recording studio—I prefer it to not be a recording studio, because in a recording studio you're like analyzing a lot more than you're playing, and for us, we're good at playing together, so it's nice for me to get as much of that material as possible and keep the tape rolling.
Our friend Bella Blasko is an amazing engineer, and she's an ace photographer, so it's like she takes a great picture of the whole thing. When you can look back there and Bella's nodding your head, you're like, "Cool, this is all working." You worry about how it's gonna make sense later in the mix, and we have this incredible mixer friend, D. James Goodwin, who helps us with that. It really is a collaborative thing, but it starts with everybody feeling like they can hear each other without headphones and be comfortable, and playing the songs 'til they feel right.
Anaïs: We've recorded a lot in spaces that aren't traditional studios, but for all three of our records, we went back to this one place in Woodstock called Dreamland, which is a studio but doesn't feel like one. It really is so important to be playing things together at the same time. I never understood that when I was younger—I thought, "Let's isolate everything and make it perfect." Now, that just doesn't even make sense to me at all. The whole point is to be playing for each other, and responding to each other. Even if we're overdubbing, everyone is in the control room listening to the takes happening, and feeling it and giving feedback. If you're playing for each other and that feels really big, it's this mutual responsiveness that feels very important to this band.
Josh: There's also moments where we're like, "We're gonna double some voices here, let's just all go out and sing the same thing." Or there's percussion, and Anaïs wants to put this high-stringed thing down, so we do the tambourine on that side of the room and the the high-stringed guitar over here, and I'll double it on this thing. And then there's more people out there together communicating at once on top of this thing. There's this mob approach to it that's fun—like a party, or a big dinner.
You guys have all been working in the music industry for a long time now. In terms of the non-musical aspects of it all, what have you observed that you may have some prescriptive opinions on when it comes to potential change?
Anaïs: I was born in '81 so I was influenced by Ani DiFranco in the '90s—the DIY singer-songwriter thing. You finance your own record, you're not going to get signed to a label, you sell it out of your car, you take whatever gig, you're your own booking agent and manager, and you sell the merch after the show. I did my time in that world for many years, and there was a way in which it felt like being on your email all the time when you're trying to be a songwriter. But I loved music so much, and I still do, that I was willing to do that. I'm so grateful that, at a certain point, I had a booking agent and manager so I didn't have to do that stuff myself—but there's an element of grunt work and logistics in which, if you love a thing enough, that lift can feel light and your love for the thing can get you through some of these harder things.
I will also say that my path has been really unusual. Money-wise, to make anything work with making records and touring a band is just very hard. Like, I wrote a musical. I spent 13 years writing it, and that's how I make my money. It's not from touring, or from records. It's very challenging to make a living—it always has been, and I think maybe it's gotten worse. I don't have time really to even know what's happening in the music industry, because I'm too busy trying to make music and having children. There's no more time left after those things.
The one thing that makes me really sad—and this is not just music, but theater also—is that it's so hard to have children and do the work. There's no one helping you there. Everyone says, "Go ahead, do it, have the babies, have a music career," and then it's like, "Oh my God, this is so hard." The schedule is backwards, it's a genuine conflict, and there's a lot of sacrifice going on there. Josh and I talk about this a lot, because we both have kids, and if we go on tour with this band, we're leaving those kids at home with our partners—and it's hard for the partners. How much can we responsibly do?
If there's any way that we can acknowledge the hardship there and be like, "Okay, here's an artist residency, I'm gonna have a child care situation so you can bring your kids to it." It will cost money—someone will have to pay it—but, like, let's acknowledge that kids exist at festivals. Let's make a kids' zone so you could maybe bring your kids to the festival and they can be there. That's a place where i would love to see some help.
Josh: I would love to see growth in that department as well. It's so fucking hard. There's this thing that happens where, for touring, I really need it to be 10 days, and agents will send you something like, "It's three weeks," and then you settle in the middle somewhere. You're really missing a lot, and the other side of that is to bring kids with you, which is expensive, so if you were gonna break even, you end up losing more, and then you're being a mediocre parent because you're splitting your time, and then you're being a mediocre bandmate too. I mean, you still have that time onstage where hopefully you can get lost, and I think our band is good at getting lost, which is great, but the music kind of demands a certain amount of presence.
We're well into our forties, and we're doing it all the time, and I don't really have the bandwidth or time to do anything else besides work every single day at being a musician and take care of my family—which, obviously, I share with my partner, but it's a lot. It's silly to say, but to be an artist, that whole thing of selling your soul—that's really what that is. You're giving yourself up, and it's like this wild horse you're riding all the time. It doesn't just turn off and on at will—it's always going, and it does keep you restless. It's hard to juggle all the normal things of having a family and trying to keep things structured while also living in this play space that shouldn't be structured, because all the good stuff seems to come out of letting the creative side grow naturally.