“I knew it as a kid,” the charming, sweet-voiced New Englander tells me, “because it was in some kind of a children’s illustrated book of mythology. I can remember an image of Orpheus ascending from the Underworld, you can see the light at the end of the tunnel and Eurydice behind him.” Anaïs Mitchell is sat with me in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, explaining the original inspiration for Hadestown, her wildly ambitious, eight-character ‘folk opera’, over the general hubbub.
From Anaïs’s childhood memory has sprung something that has toured much of the North America and internationally with its ever-changing cast and earned Anaïs a profile way beyond her previous status as a little known, if promising, singer-songwriter. That’s only right too, as Hadestown is an artistic triumph: a grand song-cycle that compels the listener to follow its characters as the story moves inexorably towards its tragic finale.
The way Anaïs tells it, the project didn’t come to her fully formed, but as a result of a number of songs she found herself writing that “seemed to be about” the Orpheus myth. Indeed, one of these, How Long?, appeared on her 2007 solo album, The Brightness, under the alternative title of Hades and Persephone. Sensing “a sort of a critical mass of them” she applied and got a small grant from the VT Arts Council in her hometown in Vermont to write and produce an opera based on the songs. “They gave me the money,” she laughs, “and then I was like, ‘oh shit, now I have to actually do it.’”
Anaïs’s local Vermont community was central in the inception of Hadestown. “My parents were hippies and there was a whole ‘back to the land’ movement where a lot people were going back to the land to buy farms. My parents got a 150 acre farm and raised sheep (and they still do actually). So it was a pretty backwards upbringing, I had the sheep, and my grandparents lived on the same farm. My brother and his wife now live on that same piece of property, so it’s a real kind of family compound.”
With fellow Vermonter Michael Chorney collaborating on the arrangements and Ben Matchstick, “this radical puppeteer guy”, on the staging, Hadestown got its theatrical debut , in December 2006 in Barre, fifty miles to the east of where Anaïs went to college in Addison County. The cast was made up of local singers including Ben Campbell as Orpheus, David Symons as Hades and Miriam Bernardo as Persephone. “There was something about it that was special enough,” Anaïs tells me, “that we decided we wanted to revive it for a second year.” It took over three years, the restaging, subsequently a tour and a lot of rewrites before Hadestown made it onto shiny silver disc.
For the album, the cast list alone is more than impressive – Justin Vernon of the hugely successful group Bon Iver plays Orpheus to Anaïs’s Eurydice (his other recording collaboration at the time was with Kanye West), whilst iconic singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco gives veteran folkie Greg Brown’s Hades a sassy counterfoil in her Persephone. Petra, Tanya and Rachel Haden, the Low Anthem’s Ben Knox Miller and a chorus ensemble complete the singers, whilst the fourteen musicians conjure up a mix of styles ranging from the ramshackle doo-wop country of ‘Way Down Hadestown’ to the minimalist orchestration and French-sounding accordion of ‘His Kiss, the Riot’ and the jazzy cabaret of ‘Our Lady of the Underground’. One thing that Anaïs has an incredible knack for is melody; having lived with the album for more than a year I still find refrains from the work spinning round in my head at night.
So where did Anaïs get her compositional talent from? “I wouldn’t say my family is particularly musical,” she tells me, “but my Dad [Don Mitchell, a “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” novelist turned professor] is a big music lover and he had a great record collection. I owe probably my love of words a lot to him.” She studied the fiddle as a child (and is trying to re-learn it but says she is “terrible”) before picking up the guitar.
“I was always into real ‘songwriter songwriters’, narrative storytelling: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Gillian Welch, people like that. But also, when I was a teenager, there was like an explosion of female artists like Ani DiFranco, Dar Williams and Tori Amos, just a very emotive, expressive female generation. I was obsessed with Ani DiFranco’s music. I was maybe 14 or 15 when her first early records came out and it was fucking crazy, I’d never heard anything like it.” Not only is Ani now a friend and Hadestown collaborator, but she has put out Anaïs’s last two albums on her independent Righteous Babe record label.
Another big influence was British folk music. “The poetry of it, and the storytelling, that’s all over folk music. I’ve always identified more with the British stuff that the American stuff. It’s hard to even explain why… you can get away with being a little fancier. American stuff is real stark, a lot of repetition, a lot of murder ballads.” As we speak, Anaïs is waiting to open a special tribute to pivotal English folk guitarist Nic Jones. Her interpretations of traditional songs recorded by Nic prove to be the surprising and welcome flavour in an otherwise conventional (if wonderful) Britfolk bill. “I’m so honoured to be part of this thing tonight,” she tells me earnestly. “We’re doing Clyde Waters, it’s a Child Ballad from the collection, and really we’re doing it because I absolutely fell in love with the Nic Jones version of that song.”
Other singers at In Search of Nic Jones include Martin Carthy, Jim Moray and Jim Causley, all of whom Anaïs knows as they were roped in to play different roles when Hadestown was performed in London in January 2011. You see, rather than trying to co-ordinate manoeuvring a regular cast around the United States and beyond, Anaïs has instead opted to make up the cast for each show with local performers. An organisational nightmare surely?
“It’s outrageous!” she laughs. “I mean every one of them has been different. I first had the idea in Boston. They have a really cool songwriter community where everyone gets together. It was really fun not only to get to hear the songs sung by different voices, but also because it was sort of a celebration of Boston.”
“London was a white knuckle one, because everyone came together for that one day, some of the other shows we’ve had a run of three or four or five days and more time to settle into it. For me, it’s always been about the uniqueness of the experience and getting to meet all those different people. Martin Carthy’s been a hero of mine for many years and to get to not only meet him but have him sing my song was a total honour like I couldn’t imagine. It’s kind of exhausting logistically so we’re not gonna do a ton more of them, but for this phase…”
With Hadestown having filled much of her creative life for many years now, what is next for Anaïs? Well first up is another ‘conventional’ album of her own material, entitled Young Man in America and due out around the time this article will go live. Even this, though, comes back to the tradition. “I’m really into British and Scottish folk ballads right now. I feel pretty sure the [upcoming] solo record has been influenced by some of the balladry. I’m also working on this project with my friend Jefferson Hamer, who plays a lot of traditional Irish music and is a songwriter. We realised we both were into this stuff and we started doing this co-arranging and writing an album’s worth of songs. A lot of mining of the Carthy canon. As well as Nic Jones.” With that Anaïs has to slip away to get ready for the show.
Listen to “Flowers (Eurydice’s Song)” from Hadestown.
(Righteous Babe, 2010)
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