Leh

Musical institutions have their funny ideas, and the quirk of the Prague Conservatoire in the 1880s was that if you were an instrumentalist you couldn't be a composer, too (evidently no one had told them about Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin et al). At his father's insistence Léhar was enrolled as a violinist, but his real interest lay in composition. He took a few secret lessons from Fibich and had the opportunity to play his D minor sonata to Dvorak, who urged him to give up the violin and switch to the composition classes. But Léhar senior was adamant and Lèhar is to be considered as practically a self-taught composer.

Bonny Light Horseman’s new album, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free, is an ode to the blessed mess of our humanity. Confident and generous, it is an unvarnished offering that puts every feeling and supposed flaw out in the open. The themes are stacked high and staked even higher: love and loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time all permeate Bonny Light Horseman’s most vulnerable and bounteous offering to date. Yet for all of its humanistic touchpoints, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free was forged from a kind of unexplainable magic.