“Anything that you love can become a trap,” says the singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. She’s talking about the career-defining stage musical Hadestown, an energetic Depression-era retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice which dominated her life for more than a decade.
Mitchell first toured it as a lo-fi theatre production in 2006, travelling through Vermont in a converted school bus, turned it into a concept album in 2010, and then spent several years reworking it for the stage with director Rachel Chavkin. Since opening on Broadway in 2019, Hadestown’s timelessly American tapestry of folk, blues, jazz, gospel and cabaret has won her a Tony award (and collected eight in total), a Grammy and a place on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2020. But it left her facing the question: what now? Her new book of exhaustively annotated Hadestown lyrics, Working on a Song, feels like a final clearing of the decks prior to the release of her self-titled seventh album, her first collection of original songs since 2012 and her “escape pod” from the musical.
“It’s so funny because I’d been working on that show for a third of my life and what did I do the moment I got done with it?” she says merrily. “I spent a year writing a book about it! But I needed to decompress and process it. It was so crazy. I had to be totally obsessed with it. If I worked on a different song, I felt like I was cheating on the show. A lot of times in the depths of rewriting I was like, I’m never fucking doing this again. I wanted to be free. But then when the show went up, there was a whole year when I could have done that and I just couldn’t.”
Two years ago, circumstances conspired to give Mitchell a clean slate. She was nine months pregnant with her second daughter when Covid-19 struck, and she left New York with her husband, Noah Hahn, just before lockdown so that she could give birth in Vermont, where she grew up. She’s talking to me from the same rental where she recorded albums in her 20s. This, she says, is her “full-circle era”.
Mitchell is an ecstatic talker, her face constantly suggesting imminent laughter, her hands a blur. When she’s especially excited by a thought, I half-expect them to spring through my laptop screen. The Hadestown star André De Shields, in his Time testimonial, wrote that “she seemed to be made entirely of magic”.
Mitchell talks about making the new album as if it were a story that needed another draft. “I feel like all of us have created a tidy narrative about the pandemic,” she says. “You thought you’d made it make sense in the cosmology of your life and now, oh my God, it’s fucking still happening and it makes less sense.” She takes a breath. “In the tidy version of this album I left the city, I returned home, I became a mother of two, I did therapy and I wanted to make this album before I turned 40.”
She had some help. Mitchell is part of 37d03d (a typographical riff on the word “people” turned upside down), the loose artistic collective founded by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Aaron and Bryce Dessner from the National; she appears alongside Taylor Swift and Fleet Foxes on the latest album by Vernon and Aaron’s fluid supergroup Big Red Machine. As an early lockdown activity, some members committed to writing a song a day. To her surprise, Mitchell emerged with the bones of an album.
“There was something about being completely removed from my milieu and also feeling a reconnection with my childhood,” she says. “I felt really invisible. I wasn’t doing it to prove anything. I wanted to do it before I even noticed what I was doing.” It could not be more different from Hadestown: a sprint rather than a marathon; intimate rather than epic. “This album isn’t larger than life,” she says. “It is life-sized.”
Forming a bubble with old friends from Bon Iver and her folk band Bonny Light Horseman, she recorded the album in Woodstock in December 2020, three months before her 40th birthday. Confidently rooted in country, folk and pop, it’s a wise and lovely record which translates life into song with spring-like freshness even as the lyrics rustle with memories and the passage of time. “I feel my age in a way I didn’t have to in the city,” Mitchell says. “You see your friends and they look older and you’re their age so you must also look older.” She laughs. “Somehow in New York everyone is ageless.”
Living back in Vermont has made Mitchell reflect on her unusual childhood. She is named after the French-American writer Anaïs Nin. Her father, Don, is a professor and author who bought a sheep farm from the proceeds of his script for the 1972 hippy road movie Thumb Tripping and her mother, Cheryl, is a social worker who served under Vermont governor Howard Dean. They moved to the state in the back-to-the-land spirit of the early 1970s, helping to establish a food cooperative and community theatre. The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 prompted Mitchell to rework Backroads, one of her new songs, complicating its teenage nostalgia with an acknowledgment of how blessed she had been.
“It hit me over the head how privileged the story I was telling was,” she says. “We think we’re living on the edge, drinking beer in the woods and then the cops come, but the truth is there are generous, loving adults surrounding us and giving us space, which is not the experience of a lot of black kids in this country. I noticed an appreciation for the safety, the love and the freedom that I was afforded as a kid.”
Mitchell studied political science at college, spent a year in Egypt and considered becoming a journalist. Instead, she says, “I became a songwriter and I took off on a Greyhound bus and I never called home. I felt completely free.” While her first album, 2002’s The Song They Sang… When Rome Fell, has been expunged from the record (“Thank God you could bury albums back in the day”), 2004’s protest-minded Hymns for the Exiled landed her a deal with Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records. DiFranco, one of her musical heroes, wound up playing Persephone on the Hadestown album in 2010, with Justin Vernon as Orpheus and Mitchell herself as Eurydice.
I wonder if she ever resented being consumed by one project for so long, however successful it became. “I had those feelings,” she agrees. “I certainly did. Now I can say I have nothing but gratitude for Hadestown. A lot of people will find my songwriter songs by way of Hadestown that would otherwise not care. But I sometimes felt like an impostor of myself. It feels incredible to sink into the mystery of a song: where does this song want to go? I’m gonna find out. Hadestown, too, came from a place of mystery but it became like a crossword puzzle where it can only be one thing.”
Mitchell is writing an essay for the music journal No Depression about pre-digital life inspired by her gently joyful song Real World. “It seemed as if it referred to the pre-pandemic world,” she says, “but I’d been carrying around that phrase for a long time and it always meant to me the world before the phones: the huge, three-dimensional sensual world that used to be all there was and now it’s been reduced to this small, flat, curated reality for so many hours out of each day. The real world is there for us but it’s harder to access.”
It figures that Mitchell is drawn to songs that predate not just smartphones but the entire industrial era. She has released an album of 17th- and 18th-century Child Ballads and also reworks old folk songs with Bonny Light Horseman, whose second album is due this year. “The traditional stuff has stuck around for a reason,” she says. “I have a desire to make songs that walk through the world on their own legs – that are useful to other people. I’m interested in the intersection of what makes me want to cry and what feels mythical. That’s where I want to live.”
Mitchell’s post-New York life sounds rather blissful, this return to first principles surrounded by friends, family and fond memories, but when she went to see Hadestown reopen on Broadway last September, she was so wowed by the pageantry of it that she spent half the show brainstorming ideas for a new musical.
“I want to stay in the flow,” she says. “But I do find myself casting around for a story to be told through songs because there’s nothing like it.” She laughs at the thought of doing it all again. “I think I could do it faster.”
Anaïs Mitchell’s self-titled new album is released on 28 January through BMG
