“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.
