“Rolling Golden Holy”
Bonny Light Horseman: From hobby project to folk band
Anais Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson and Josh Kaufman are Bonny Light Horseman. photo
© D. James Goodwin/Cargo Records/dpa
Three well-known individualists of US indie rock and folk do not necessarily make a good band. Bonny Light Horseman also prove with their second album that it can succeed.
The US trio Bonny Light Horseman is a kind of all-star band or supergroup of indie pop: singer Anaïs Mitchell (41) has won various Tony Awards and the Grammy for her album “Hadestown” and its musical stage version.
Singer-songwriter Eric Donald Johnson (46) is known from the Fruit Bats and The Shins, among others. Multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman (44) is considered one of the most important US producers at the moment, including working in the studio for The National, The War On Drugs and Taylor Swift.
Together these three disparate musicians deliver their second album as Bonny Light Horseman – and like 2020’s self-titled, Grammy-nominated debut, it’s top notch. The striking voices of Mitchell and Johnson complement each other wonderfully on “Rolling Golden Holy”, and the melodies rooted in the folk pop of the 1960s and 70s are at least as polished as they were when this ambitious project started.
More Americana feeling
While the first album was largely based on some very old British folk songs, so it was more of a cover record, Bonny Light Horseman wrote their eleven current songs entirely themselves. “For the new album, this folk identity was then developed so far that we could rely entirely on our own songs,” Kaufman told “Rolling Stone” (10/2022) about the latest development. Mitchell told music magazine Uncut that the new work has “a little more Americana feel” than its more traditional predecessor.
That’s how “Rolling Golden Holy” works as convincing proof that a hobby venture of three individualists can become a real band. Rarely does contemporary folk pop create such a perfect connection between the sunny west coast (“California”, “Summer Dream”) and the cooler eastern regions of the USA (“Cold Rain And Snow”), from which these outstanding musicians come. Bonny Light Horseman’s second album is a good way to get through the most inhospitable autumn.
Bonny Light Horseman’s album “Rolling Golden Holy” will be released on Friday (October 7th) on the 37d03d/Cargo label.