Bonny Light Horseman announces new album + shares new video for single “California”
Oh my fucking god. All I have ever wanted in this life is more Bonny Light Horseman. Ask and you shall receive. Waves of golden guitar, harmonies from the angels, percussion of the devil at his best. Please just kill me and let me live in BLH land forever.
Bonny Light Horseman today announced their sophomore album Rolling Golden Holy will be released on October 7th, 2022, via 37d03d Records. Produced by the band’s Josh Kaufman, Rolling Golden Holy is the follow-up to their critically acclaimed, self-titled debut which earned two GRAMMY nominations (Best Folk Album and Best American Roots Performance) and was named one of the ‘Best Albums of 2020’ by Paste, Boston Globe, MOJO, Uncut Magazine, and more. The album’s breezy and bittersweet lead single “California”—a timely and incorruptible classic about moving on in search of something else, if not something more—is out now. Rolling Golden Holy is now available for pre-order HERE.
“This one started off as a little crooked minor-key old timey tune. Then the three of us took it through the ringer together and it became what you’re hearing now. We sat in a room in the woods of New York and clawed and pawed at it until it turned into a little bittersweet shuffler,” explains Eric D. Johnson of “California.” “Our first record was largely centered on the old world, whether it was some sort of mythical sweeping landscape on some British Isle, or maybe the old cities of the American East. This is probably our first West Coast song. It’s a sad one, a story about pulling up roots, new beginnings, goodbyes, early morning long drives, riding into the sunrise instead of the sunset. They usually don’t end movies riding into the sunrise but this movie has that scene.”
Bonny Light Horseman, who are currently on tour supporting Bon Iver and have a handful of standalone shows this month as well, have announced an initial run of fall headline tour dates. They will also perform next month at the Newport Folk Festival on July 23rd. A current itinerary is below and more news will be announced soon.
If the band’s debut LP felt at all like the work of some short-lived supergroup or a one-off diversion (it never was), Rolling Golden Holy rebuffs the notion with preternatural beauty, charm, and imagination. These 11 songs—all originals, written and realized by the trio as a whole—follow the paths of the traditional tunes the band cherishes to new musical and lyrical frontiers, and give the sounds and situations of history the gravity and shape of now. Rolling Golden Holy confirms that Bonny Light Horseman is not a project but a band, and one presently working at the forefront of modern American folk.
Rolling Golden Holy’s initial writing sessions—and two subsequent recording sessions, first at Aaron Dessner’s Long Pond studio and then at what they label their “spiritual home,” the gorgeous and bosky old church called Dreamland—were a series of “yes, and” encounters, each member encouraging the others to take an idea and run with it a little further, to push past comfort zones. The trio asks—and, with every tune here, answers—an essential question on Rolling Golden Holy: Where does traditional folk music end and modern folk music begin, if there even is such a binary? These songs continually suggest and embody an unspoken continuum.
The circumstances of Bonny Light Horseman’s debut prompted a litany of guests; the circumstances of Rolling Golden Holy, however, prompted a deepening of the trio’s collaboration with drummer JT Bates and bassist/saxophonist Mike Lewis, the only other players here. These constraints motivate the quintet. With its frolicking banjo and playful horn, “Sweetbread” is an ecstatic existential manifesto, Mitchell grinning as she exclaims “Blue sky, Lord, when I die” above Bates’ ascendant drums. The stately “Comrade Sweetheart” is the flip side of the same coin, with the lock-and-key harmonies of Johnson and Mitchell arcing over the exquisitely prismatic arrangement of Bates’ muted cymbal splashes, Lewis’ restrained bass, Kaufman’s sculpted symphony of organ and guitar. This is Bonny Light Horseman stepping into the full splendor of its life as a full band.
Being in a band is obviously not a novel enterprise, but Bonny Light Horseman has always thrived in rendering fresh wisdom and insight from old models, whether that’s scraps of ancient songs or the spark of ever-entwined voices. This is a network of mutualism, created for sharing, learning, risking, singing, and playing as one, not as mere sums of fractions. Rolling Golden Holy, then, is Bonny Light Horseman’s testament to interdependence, partnership, and trust at a moment when we crave such connections so much. Mitchell, Kaufman, and Johnson fully appreciate what they have found in one another through Bonny Light Horseman; on Rolling Golden Holy, we get to live inside that magic, too.
Read Bonny Light Horseman’s full bio / download photos & album art HERE.
