#37d03d

MINA TINDLE - “Jessa”, from the album ‘Sister’, out now on 37d03d

Excerpt from Space for the Liberty Muse by Jessica Dessner, commissioned by Sounds from a Safe Harbour 2017

Dancer Jessica Dessner (with Stephanie Dufresne, Veronica Tundis and Robyn Byrne)

Photo by D. James Goodwin

The first self-titled Bonny Light Horseman album stole in unexpectedly in the dead season (at least for musical releases) of January 2020. Anaïs Mitchell was already famous for a folk career and Hadestown, but she would become much more so. Eric Johnson was medium-well known for his work in the Fruit Bats. And Josh Kaufman was the one I had to look up, but he too, had a track record as a producer and collaborator with bands including the National, Josh Ritter and others. But even so, fair to say, that no one was expecting the haunted, spidery grace of Bonny Light Horseman’s first album, with its spare, melancholic title track, its swelling, billowing choruses in “Blackwaterside,” its strident harmonies, its careful extrapolations from folk picked tradition. In my review for Dusted, I wrote, “Haunting denatured harmonies fill the spaces between rickety porch folk tunes, and it’s not hard to hear the influence of Justin Vernon in the swell and spectral auras.” The album was nominated for two Grammys. 

 Two and a half years — and a global pandemic — later, the trio is back, making the case that Bonny Light Horseman is a band, not a one-off meeting of sensibilities. Written and recorded in upstate New York in the spring of 2021, Rolling Golden Holy is more comfortable and assured than its predecessor, but not as eerily evocative. If the self-titled was a twilight vista full of mist and longing, the follow-up ambles through sunny backroads. It has a bit more Johnson, a bit less Mitchell in its mix, though the two artists find intriguing common ground on multiple occasions. 

ACL 2021 ~ The Top 20 Albums of the Year

If 2020 was the most surreal year in recent memory, 2021 was the runner-up.  A rollercoaster of emotion was supplanted by a mountain of malaise.  And yet, many artists broke through with the finest albums of their careers.  Some of these were direct responses to the world as it was, while others were simply written in unprecedented conditions.  Some composers offered comfort, others reflection,…

ACL 2021 ~ Top Ten Modern Composition

This year, we reviewed more modern composition albums than those in any other genre ~ not because more were submitted, but because their overall quality was so high.  We read this trend early in our Spring Music Preview, and it continued throughout the year.  The backstories were intriguing as well, from Australian wildfires to the passing of a friend.  Could it be that the break from touring and…