Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
She wrote the smash Broadway musical “Hadestown,” which won eight Tonys in 2019.
This Friday, Anaïs Mitchell will perform live at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Maryland.
“It is essentially a two-band bill, but the two bands are very similar,” Mitchell told WTOP. “The first set is from my folk band Bonny Light Horseman with Josh Kaufman and Eric D. Johnson … then we take a break and slightly reconfigure the stage to play my new record.”
Her newest tunes were written during a pandemic getaway to New England.
“This is definitely a pandemic album,” Mitchell said. “The pandemic hit New York City, I was nine-months pregnant with our second kid when New York started to feel like not a place to give birth. We made this 11th-hour decision to leave and go to Vermont where my family is and where I’m born and raised, and I had the baby on my parents’ sheep farm.”
Born in Montpelier, Vermont in 1981, Mitchell grew up a Quaker.
“My parents were hippie back-to-the-landers from the suburbs of New Jersey who bought a sheep farm in Vermont,” Mitchell said. “I was raised on stuff from that culture: folk music, the rise of singing songbook, I studied the violin as a kid. Then in high school I came under the influence of powerful female songwriters like Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos, Dar Williams.”
At age 22, she won the New Folk Award at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. After recording her debut album “The Song They Sang…When Rome Fell” (2002) in Austin, her second album “Hymns for the Exiled” (2004) got her signed by Righteous Babe Records.
“I love storytelling, balladry, British Isles balladry, the Texas songwriter tradition of Townes Van Zandt, very wordy, word-smithy, storyteller type of songs,” Mitchell said. “In that sense, it wasn’t a huge leap to go from writing songs to writing a piece of musical theater.”
In 2006, Mitchell delivered her first draft of her folk opera “Hadestown.”
“I was driving home from one of these gigs, I think I was in Virginia, I’m on the highway and these lines dropped out of the sky,” Mitchell said. “It was the melody of that song ‘Wait for Me’ from ‘Hadestown’ and it went: ‘Wait for me I’m coming, in my garters and pearls, with what melody did you barter me, from the wicked underworld?'”
Those lyrics never made it into the show, but they inspired the musical, adapting the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, who visits the underworld to rescue his lover, Eurydice.
“It was just a story, a myth that I remember from when I was a kid that I always loved and made a big impression on me,” Mitchell said. “I just started to follow the thread into the labyrinth. … 95% of it was me banging my head against a wall at a desk somewhere trying to make a rhyme that would incrementally improve some aspect of the show.”
“Hadestown” unfolded at the New York Theatre Workshop in the summer of 2016.
“It was an extraordinary moment to put the pencil down,” Mitchell said. “There came a moment where I had to do that. I was literally not allowed to change anything else because the show had to be locked to open on Broadway. It was a feeling like, ‘Wow, as much work as I know I personally put into this thing, it doesn’t feel like it’s mine. It’s its own animal.'”
It earned 14 Tony nods, winning eight, including Best Musical and Best Original Score.
“It’s like a dream to me,” Mitchell said. “It’s as if I was sleepwalking. I sometimes look at photos on my phone from that time like, ‘Who was that? How did that happen?’ I’m so grateful for those awards … [but] I’ve stopped looking for the satisfaction of those public recognition moments because you’re just a deer in the headlights — at least I was.”
She was thrilled to see Baltimore native Andre DeShields win Best Supporting Actor.
“Andre is just an extraordinary human,” Mitchell said. “He was in his 70s! Obviously he had been received as a great artist before this, but it was as if him walking up there, that slow walk up there, his beautiful speech to receive this Tony, it was like he was gracefully meeting his destiny. He knew he was destined for it. He just had to wait 73 years.”
Mitchell gracefully returned to her destiny in 2020 by forming the band Bonny Light Horseman, which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album in 2021.
“It was like a gateway drug back to the world of music,” Mitchell said. “I found working on ‘Hadestown’ that I didn’t have a lot of bandwidth to write my own songwriter songs. … The exception to that rule was this project, Bonny Light Horseman, especially because our first album was inspired by traditional texts. … It was like drinking from a deep well.”
Will she ever return to Broadway at any point in the future?
“For people who come to [Strathmore], we are doing a couple of ‘Hadestown’ songs,” Mitchell said. “I’m really enjoying just writing songs and making records right now, it feels like right where I want to be, but I don’t like to imagine not writing another musical. … I would love to do it again. It’s just a matter of having to care about that story 1,000%.”
Who knows? Maybe some more lyrics will drop out of the sky en route to Strathmore.
“I’ll keep my net open,” Mitchell said.
Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
