Bonny Light Horseman ride in for OHM Festival of Other Music
American folk trio Bonny Light Horseman is just one of the innovative acts coming to Brisbane Powerhouse for the OHM Festival of Other Music.
Since debuting at Brisbane Powerhouse in 2023, the OHM Festival of Other Music has made a name for itself as a platform for performers who are innovators, pioneers and tomorrow’s legends in their musical fields.
The line-up for 2025 continues to build on that stellar reputation, showcasing local and international musical acts that run the gamut from folk, meditative classical and electronica sounds to silent disco, rock and cabaret.
US folk music phenomenon Bonny Light Horseman are travelling Down Under to make their Australian debut at the festival, which runs from February 28 to March 22.
Also on the bill is Irish cabaret chanteuse Camille O’Sullivan, Nigerian rock legends Etran de L’Air, Japanese rock band The 5.6.7.8’s, Australian surf rockers King Stingray, Brisbane’s Camerata and local jazz musician Toby Wren.
Brisbane Powerhouse program director and OHM Festival of Other Music programmer Phoebe Meredith says that the event brings together a diverse group of performers whose musical practice spans wildly different genres. In doing so, she hopes the festival provides “a little bit of something for everyone”.
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“We work with a number of local producers and promoters to keep abreast of who is going to be in the country when the festival is on. We’re really lucky in that we have had many of them approach us and ask whether we’d be keen to have particular acts involved,” Meredith says. “We’ve got a radically broad line-up of performers who hit different marks and suit different tastes this time around. Hopefully, that makes for a great festival.”
Anais Mitchell, the frontwoman and one-third of folk trio Bonny Light Horseman, is looking forward to escaping her “absolutely freezing” home in upstate New York and catching some of Brisbane’s famous sunshine during her time here.
Mitchell, an accomplished independent solo singer/songwriter who found mainstream success with her musical Hadestown, formed the band in 2018 with Fruit Bats frontman Eric D. Johnson and producer and musician Josh Kaufman.
The group has released three critically acclaimed albums, one of which is the sprawling 18-song, 2024 double-album Keep Me On Your Mind/See Me Free, a true magnum opus with no official tracklisting for either record, just a continuous soundscape of songs flowing into one another.
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“This album is a lot,” Mitchell says. “It’s life, it’s midlife, it’s family life, domestic frustration, falling in love, seeing the love of your life somehow disfigured by your relationship, remembering mortality, a lot of journeying and a lot of trying to be present – all of that. It often felt like we were writing towards or into each other’s experiences or conversations. I think it ends up feeling a lot like a long dinner conversation with old friends.
“In the same way that we said yes to putting all 18 songs together, we also said yes to both titles for them to be held under. It’s all one body of work. The two titles are the first and the last track of the body of work and there’s a journey between them. As Josh put it, there’s the tension between wanting to be held and wanting to let go, wanting to hold someone – or something or someplace – and wanting to let it or them go.”
Johnson and Kaufman both come to folk music from a rock background while, for Mitchell, the formation of the group was a return to the genre after the fevered and passionate time she spent writing Hadestown, her multiple Tony Award-winning retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
While the band wanted to explore traditional folk music, they had no desire for their recordings to sound like Smithsonian research material. Instead, the trio set out to have a conversation with, and invite a collaboration with, the songs. Mitchell says that approach has worked “beautifully”.
“The main thing that sets the album apart from some revivalist folk music is that there is a lot of space around the verses and the voices,” she says. “We started all these songs with open tunings on the guitar and just kept seeing where the music would take us. With some tracks, we are interpreting traditional songs, then on others we’ve departed so far from the originals that we felt like we had co-written something with that tradition.
“I’m looking forward to seeing how Australian audiences react to these songs. I never got to be a part of a band like this before and the comradeship is deep. I consider these guys my deep, life-long brothers . It’s an honour to get to travel and play music with them. At its best, I forget who’s playing what part and just melt into the music. That’s what I think we’re all after with music – a blurring of the edges of the self.”
OHM Festival of Other Music, Brisbane Powerhouse, February 28 to March 22.