Heading to Womadelaide, Bonny Light Horseman is a gorgeous folk trio that formed in 2018, and is made up of Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson and Josh Kaufman.
Their debut album received a 2020 Grammy Award nomination for Best Folk Album.
Their third and most recent album was inspired by time spent recording in County Cork, Ireland, and what they call their “messy and tangled up pile of life”, which infuses their music with wisdom, humour and depth. Theirs is the stuff that defines folk music as a genre: love and loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time.
Mitchell is a celebrated solo artist, who has to only released eight solo albums, but is also the playwright and songwriter behind the Tony award winning Broadway musical which has just arrived in Australia, Hadestown. Kaufman has recorded and performed with artists ranging from Bob Weir, The National, The War on Drugs, Josh Ritter, The Hold Steady and Taylor Swift.
Ahead of the bands trip Down Under and their appearance in Adelaide, Irresistible chatted to the third member of the band, the prolific Eric D. Johnson, who is best known as the mind behind beloved indie mainstays Fruit Bats, and has also appeared on albums by The Shins, Califone, Sally Timms and Vetiver. He also records under the moniker EDJ and has worked as a producer for albums by artists such as Breathe Owl Breathe and Nina Persson. In 2010 he produced his first film score and has gone on to write a number of original scores for films including Wild, Our Idiot Brother and Smashed.
You’re coming to Womadelaide as part of a huge tour of Australia. Have you played Australia before?
I think I’m the only member of the band that’s been to Australia before. I toured Down Under 18 yrs ago with a band called The Shins. That’s a really long time ago, so I’m going to stay for a little holiday. I’m the only one in the band without kids so I’m coming a little early and will hang out for a few days after. We’re all really excited to come down and hang in Australia. With The Shins I played Adelaide, but only a venue, not the festival. Womadelaide sounds like a great vibe, a bigger span where you can make discoveries. That’s always the most fun part of going to a festival. You can expect a fun show. It’s a full explosive experience.
The latest album Keep Me on Your Mind/ See You Free came out last year. How has the response been on tour and can you talk about the threads running through the album?
This Australia leg is really the last hurrah of this album tour. We did North America, Europe and the U.K. The album has gone down really well. It was impossible not to talk about mid-life issues and our journeys on this album, as that’s where we all are. The first album was a homage to traditional English and Irish music, so a lot came form ancient source material. The next record was us learning how to write together, but now we’re really like this three-headed beast. Our stories are interwoven, we have some things in common, some things not. Some of these tracks are us telling each other’s life stories to each other. It’s a conversation. Luckily we don’t tour too much so we’re not sick of the songs, or each other! There’s a lot of love.
Will there be a new album this year?
We all like to write and we’re already thinking about creating some new work. Maybe even on this Australian tour we’ll start writing the new album! We didn’t have any expectations about the first record, we definitely weren’t expecting the Grammy nominations, so we’re just happy that we can keep going. We’re very much a live band, and we’ve even talked about maybe doing a live album. It’s about connecting with people, and meeting people through the thing that you know connects to them, but without making it a re-tread. It’s a balance between what you know works and moving forward. You have to trust the process.
You’ve recorded in some cool places.
We ending up being able to go to a pub in West Cork to record this album. It’s an utterly magical place. A lot of our music is tapped into the music from that area, so being holed up in this great Irish pub for four days was pretty much perfection. We recorded the first album at Funkhaus, which is a crazy beautiful Soviet era old bunker in East Berlin. The second album we stayed closer to home. We always have a feeling to go somewhere interesting.
Which other festivals hit the mark for you?
I’ve come to have a real affinity for the Canadian folk festivals like Winnipeg Folk Festival. They have a similar vibe of that air of discovery. They’re eclectic and stay true to their roots. There’s a festival in Oregon called Pickathon which I’m in love with that’s again a festival with a slightly more curatorial bent, where as an artist you’re as excited to be there as an audience member. We played Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival last year in Tennessee, and that was super fun. We made a lot of discoveries of big pop bands that we wound’t otherwise have found, which was really cool. Festivals are always going to give you a couple of things to get really excited about that you wouldn’t normally see.
Who helped guide you to becoming a professional musician?
I didn’t go to university or anything, I just moved to Chicago. I was somehow adopted by the music scene there. At a very young age I joined this band Califone and they became like older brothers to me. They took me on my first tour and helped me think that doing this for life was possible. Tim from Califone definitely saved my life. If I hadn’t joined his band I’m not sure what I’d be doing right now. They’re all still going. Early on in Chicago I went to this place called the Old Town School of Folk Music, and learnt how to play the banjo. I became good enough that eventually I took over the class from my banjo teacher. Banjo is the only instrument I’m actually trained in.
Had did you find your way to music as a child?
I’m from the mid- West and no-one in my family made music, so early on becoming a musician was an impossible thing to envision, like becoming an astronaut or sailing the Seven Seas, but I always wanted to do something creative. I didn’t get good grades, so my parents were more worried that I should be focusing on my studies, but they were always supportive. I thought about making movies or writing books, anything to do with storytelling.
I was always good at singing, and not nervous about it. I remember in the 4th grade we had to go around in a music class and sing, and I remember being able to feel how scared the other kids were, and I wasn’t. I was never afraid to use my voice. Some buddies in high school asked me to join their band. I didn’t play an instrument at first, but didn’t feel I could just stand there and sing, so I forced myself to learn guitar to join their band. I taught myself initially with a chord book, and then the lead guitarist in that band taught me some chords.
Do you have any tips for being on tour? Any advice for bands starting out?
I’m really good at being on tour. I take a load of vitamins and supplements, I run every morning. I’m pretty healthy. But if I’m talking to a new band starting out and say, they’re 18 years old, I’d say party as hard as you want. For someone my age, I’d say pace yourself, hydrate, don’t get drunk before the show. I have a whole lot of tour theories. I have to get myself nervous before a show. It’s a good nervous. I normally pace around like a caged animal for a while. I believe in the performance and the connectivity of the experience, so I need to get into the zone. I can’t just be on the phone to my mom, and then jump on stage. I have to conjure up some spirits a little bit.
What’s the funniest thing that’s happened to you on tour?
I’m not sure if it’s funny but it was memorable. On the last day of our last tour we were trying to catch the ferry from Wales to Ireland to get to our gig. We missed it, but got on the next one. There was a terrible storm, 50ft waves, a total nightmare. Half of the band was projectile vomiting and violently ill for the whole four hours. It was a surreal scene of chaos. I think my Viking Scandinavian blood kicked in and I was OK. Because we were late we had to get off the boat and go immediately to the gig and climb on stage. A couple of the guys said it was the worst day of their life. We must have been the most haggard band to ever take the stage in that venue. We channeled the pain to get some really great emotions out on stage. It was a good gig!
What’s your spirit animal?
I’m a Gemini and a dog person, I have two dogs. My favourite animal is an otter, that’s the cutest animal that there is.
Who are your musical heroes that you would love to see?
I tour so much, so I don’t get to many other gigs, which is a shame. That’s why it’s so fun to go to festivals. I always wanted to see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I kept planning to go so many times, and then he passed away. If I had a time machine I would see them while Tom was still alive. I would love to see Paul McCartney one day.
You work as a composer as well?
I’ve actually scored a bunch of movies. That’s something else I do. It is a totally different musical muscle, which I enjoy. It’s deeply collaborative, which I love, and you’re working towards someone else’s end. I always advise people starting to work with film, that it’s not yours, you have to be able to let it go. Obviously you can go nuts in film scores too, Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead classically does wild scores, but I love having some structure around it, and when you come back to write a song for yourself, it’s extremely freeing.
So who would you want to play you in a film about your life?
I’d like to play myself. I’ve done a little bit of acting. I could play a different version of myself, I could go full Curb Your Enthusiasm, it would be fun!
WOMADELAIDE
7-10 March 2025
Botanic Park/ Tainmuntilla
