Quite often the best creative endeavours happen by complete accident.
Eric D Johnson, the singer of a Chicago indie rock band called Fruit Bat and a former member of The Shins, heard that two musician friends were convening to try out some folk songs. Johnson was so curious he asked to get involved in some capacity.
Singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, who has worked with The National, Josh Ritter, The Hold Steady, and The War on Drugs, accepted Eric's offer to sit in on the session, which was essentially an intimate and informal porch-jam.
The trio’s musical chemistry was immediately evident and led to the formation of a brand-new band, a supergroup of sorts comprising of three illustrious American music makers. In early 2020, the group, now named Bonny Light Horseman after a lament for a soldier who died during the Napoleonic wars, released their eponymous debut album.
On it, Johnson, Mitchell and Kaufman were joined by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who had invited the band to appear at the the Eaux Claires Music & Arts Festival that he co-founded with The National’s Aaron Dessner for their maiden live performance. Their self-titled debut features a mixture of original compositions with traditional material. It won them an unexpected Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album. A second album, Rolling Golden Holy, followed in 2022. "Bonny Light Horseman songs are collective musical exploration, part archaeological and part psychedelic," Anaïs Mitchell explained as an attempt to pinpoint their modern take on old numbers.
For two very special shows in the Cork Opera House and the National Concert Hall this September, British conductor and violinist Robert Ames, who has worked with Jonny Greenwood, Foals, Frank Ocean, DJ Shadow, Belle and Sebastian, and Vivienne Westwood, will conduct the RTÉ Concert Orchestra accompanying Bonny Light Horseman. Ames is currently co-artistic director and co-principal conductor of the London Contemporary Orchestra, who performed orchestral arrangements on Radiohead’s latest studio album in 2016, A Moon Shaped Pool.
Bryce Dessner of The National, a seasoned collaborator with a plethora of artists such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, and Taylor Swift, has composed new arrangements for these world premieres in Cork and Dublin, which are presented in conjunction with Songs from a Safe Harbour and the Barbican, London.
The American all-star trio have won global acclaim, accolades and awards, but view their primary objective as breathing new life into old music.
"This is folk music," says Kaufman, who was named in Time magazine’s top 100 influential people of 2020. "It doesn’t belong to anyone. I think there’s something beautiful about that. There are many, many versions of these songs, all mashed up, and it has more in common with jazz and hip-hop than old, dead music that’s not going anywhere. These songs are all still alive and by borrowing, stealing and moving them around you keep them alive."
Bonny Light Horseman and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra play Cork Opera House on Friday September 8th, and the National Concert Hall, Dublin on Thursday, September 14th, in collaboration with Sounds from a Safe Harbour - find out more here.
