ANAIS MITCHELL

THE ROAD FROM THERE TO HERE

by Harry C. Tuniese

I’m always amazed by my sudden discovery of any entertainer who totally clicks me on. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what impulse forced me to check them out, because although it seems some talents have either been here forever—while some slowly creep into your consciousness—it feels great to stay ahead of the curve. Developing the focus and testament, it’s only quality and integrity of the artist that will maintain the attention.

Quite a few years ago, I was talking to Cindy Howes (then music-director of WERS) about up and coming talents and the first name she mentioned was Anais Mitchell, a young folk singer from Vermont with a bubbly personality and contemplative compositions. Light and dark—just the way I like it. Named after the bohemian feminist, Anais Nin, she studied literature and political science in college and began attending music festivals and playing local gigs. Inspired by the Lilith Fair crowd, she began writing songs and her first big break came in 2003, when the Kerrville Folk Festival honored her with its New Folk Award.

She says, “Words have always been really important to me. And they say if you want to be a poet nowadays, you better learn to play guitar, because there’s not much work for you otherwise, Learning to write songs was a way of being a writer and being able to be heard.”

Anais had released two albums by the time I came on board—The Song They Sang... When Rome Fell in 2002 and Hymns of the Exiled in 2004. I’ve still never heard her debut, but the follow-up sounds like the work of a fluid and studied young singer, slowly shaping her own songwriting voice.

Oh, that voice! A unique element of her attractiveness, it has a magical quality that demands recognition—a chirpy, girlish innocence with poignant and plaintive control that combines the earthiness of Shawn Colvin, the boho-hipness of Rickie Lee Jones, the pop-spriteliness of Cyndi Lauper, the child-like bite of Joanna Newsom, and the urban energy of Ani DiFranco. It’s refreshing that it contains elements of varied contradictory, musical styles and sensibilities, without ever succumbing to self-consciousness. Yup, taken in from the start!

Though Hymns made her budding talent obvious, Anais’s next step would prove to be a challenging key to her subsequent development. Having been brought up in a family of teachers, writers, social workers, travelers, and hippies, she was lured into retelling the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a folk opera, and cast the show using her talented friends in Vermont. She began to write the tunes for Hadestown in 2005, aided by the vision of her theatrical director, Ben Matchstick, and the incredible arrangements of her music producer, Michael Chorney. The collaboration worked. And though those early shows were flawed writing wise they were able to build a whole vocabulary to start a buzz.

The folk opera can meld divergent musical traditions and tales into a potent formula of fluid storytelling, rooted artistry and emotional charge. The folk opera is ultimately an extended version of what every folk song is, just take the whole idea and make it longer. To watch the show is to fall deep into the world of a song, see what happens, and follow the characters along for the ride. Musical themes are looped, lyrics enter again, feelings and subtexts are allowed to build and resonate. The slow momentum of an extended piece provides more chance for a potent catharsis.

Anais kept an extensive journal of the play’s development and offered her overview: “The feedback we got from those initial shows was pretty overwhelming. It felt like we had struck some kind of nerve. Still, there was so much missing from the story; people were saying things like, “Hey, I was so moved by that … what was going on?” So when we decided to mount a second draft of the show Ben and I really made an effort to flesh out the story with the lyrics and staging—not just the metaphoric emotional stuff, but the characters, the plot, the arc. I’d say writing-wise the show took many steps forward and a couple steps back during that second edition. I spent months writing very expositional lyrics that eventually got cut. There was constant tension in my mind between getting the story across and preserving the poetry of the songs: not just the purdy language, but the metaphors.

“I think it’s safe to say all three of us—Ben, Michael, and I—are pretty influenced by the work of Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill. Brecht seems to approach the same tough theme in Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage: morality ceasing to exist in desperate conditions—‘First you must feed us, then we’ll all behave.’ I didn’t get deep into it until 2006 when we started working on the second production, but in any case, the Depression-era stuff was part of the show long before the current US economy tanked.

“It really dawned on me during this process that Hadestown was never gonna be a Broadway-style show. I was watching all kinds of Broadway stuff on video, classic musicals, trying to get a feel for story arc and so on. Everything is so clear and crude in those shows. But as much as I love a clear-cut story, this show just didn’t want to go there, at least not all the way. It was very dense and poetic and it was the battleground where I played out the exposition-versus-poetry conflict for months as I edited it and re-edited it. It’s where I learned firsthand this lesson I heard in an address Stephen Sondheim gave where he said, ‘You have to understand that an audience hears a song in real time. It doesn’t matter how clever or beautiful your lyrics are, if they pass by too quickly for the audience to comprehend, it’s not working.’ I was changing lyrics right up till opening night—which I see now was unnecessary, not to mention stressful.

“As for the staging, the second time round we had more money and more time-—though not by much! The cast was expanded; Ben had pulled together some crazy awesome stuff with lights and this ‘utility chorus’ that moved sets around on stage and populated the world he’d created. He really wrote some crazy beautiful staging sequences for that second draft of the show. As for Michael’s arrangements, he made all kinds of changes, improvements, and additions to the score. There were a handful of new songs, intros, bridges. His was a hard position to be in vis-a-vis the collaboration because as the story was changing—and Ben and I were rethinking plot points, lyrics, etc.—there was plenty of perfectly gorgeous score that had to be modified or even scrapped to accommodate the changes. It’s hard to edit lyrics and staging, but probably even harder to edit a score for six instruments!

“That year we had a more ambitious tour schedule, which actually did travel around Vermont and then down to Somerville Theatre in Boston. We were loading the entire set, the sound and light equipment, onto this old school bus and setting it up on different stages. We were crazy to try and tour a theater show like that. It was full-on winter and there were white-out blizzards a couple of nights. I lost a bunch of money on that tour, because of a few very dead towns, but a lot of the shows were really fantastic.”

Reading and hearing about this effort only made me yearn for a chance to have seen this project in its infant stages, witnessing this relaxed, seemingly amateur gathering of singers suddenly blossom into a complex fabric of interpersonal and musical eloquence. Much like our local musical theatre troupe, Boston Rock Opera (and their ten years of productions), or even older mega-famous rock notions like the Who’s Tommy, the Kinks’ Preservation Acts 1 & 2, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar or even the current Green Day’s American Idiot or the Decemberist’s The Hazards of Love, the task of bridging different mediums forces composers to think past their individuality to create a storyline unified by common themes, multiple parts, and songs with a coherent narrative.

In the midst of all this activity, Anais continued to tour nationally, often showcasing a few of the play’s tunes in her solo shows. Her second album landed in the hands of one of her heroes, Ani DiFranco, who promptly signed her to her label, Righteous Babe Records, and released The Brightness in 2007. Here she zeroed in on her strengths to produce an earnest record of astounding new tunes. The reviews were ecstatic, “recognizing a songwriter of startling clarity and depth,” offering “vivid snapshots of sweetly ordinary moments” and composing “stories that weave an effortless and skilled tapestry.” I was simply knocked out by its intense originality and clever simplicity, enhanced by the superb eclectic production of her long-time collaborator, Michael Chorney. It works on every level—songwriting, performance, and diversity—a folk music with deep meaning and rich texture.

In 2008‚ Mitchell and Chorney returned to the play, working with DiFranco bassist and producer Todd Sickafoose on a finished recorded version of the show. As the planning took shape‚ Anais convinced Ani to sing the part of Persephone. She‚ in turn‚ brought in friend and folk legend Greg Brown to lend his subterranean bass voice to the role of Hades. And on a tour through the U.K.‚ Anais asked Justin Vernon [Bon Iver] to be Orpheus. He accepted. Over the next few months‚ Ben Knox Miller [The Low Anthem] signed on to be Hermes‚ the Messenger‚ and the Haden Triplets [Petra‚ Tanya‚ and Rachel‚ the daughters of Charlie Haden] became the voices of the Fates. Anais reprised her role as Eurydice.

During the next two years, sessions came and went with many musical innovations. Anais reworked many of the tunes, dropped some, and added others. Michael constantly changed the score to suit the recording process. Todd brought in unique instrumentation to augment the sound he heard for the album: vintage futurism. As the interest grew, the core team felt humbled by the experience.

From Anais’s journal: “I feel‚ probably first and foremost‚ more than anything‚ honored and lucky. It’s a cool feeling to be a writer‚ and to have my songs brought into the world by other people‚ but to know they came from an intention I understand. I guess I feel a little dwarfed by the cast‚ because I admire them all so much‚ and they’re all famous people. So I think‚ ‘How am I going to tour this thing? What if people hear this record and they have this larger-than-life expectation about what it would be like to hear me sing the songs?’ More than that‚ I feel really high on the lessons that I was talking about earlier; how this was a collaboration‚ a collaborative thing that I struggled with it at different times. How it was hard‚ dealing with people and letting go.

“Ultimately‚ the moral of the story is that there’s nothing better‚ or more inspiring than this kind of collaboration. We do these things for each other. You know what I mean? Maybe sometimes in our bedroom we’re like‚ I’m this great thing‚ or whatever, I’m going to do this great thing for the world. But we do them for each other‚ and to be able to do them with each other feels right and good. It’s worth it‚ and I just want to do it more and more. It’s just exciting to expand the scene. For me and Michael, we’ve worked together a bunch‚ and now there’s Todd‚ and all these singers‚ and the world’s a little smaller.”

After three years of hard work‚ fast-forward to the present. In March 2010, Hadestown—the third go-round—was released on Righteous Babe Records. Like wow—my head is still spinning because the entire product is pitch perfect, from the gorgeous artwork and libretto, the top-notch performances, the total sound and production unto the very last note of the album. I can’t get enough of that Orpheus and Eurydice stuff. I believe it’s an exquisite masterpiece that lives in somewhere between the worlds of folk‚ gospel, jazz‚ swing, avant garde, and theatre—a triumph of one original voice working with more than a dozen talented singers and instrumentalists—and it rarely left my CD player for over a month.

In the meantime, the folk opera took to the road once again, coming to visit at Club Passim. At last—my first chance to see this enacted on stage—and it was a slice of heaven! Three sold-out shows! Anais Mitchell’s mythic dream, set up beautifully like a modern radio drama with a front round table featuring two mics and a guest cast of local talent—Tim Gearan (Hades), Dinty Child (Hermes), Kris Delmhorst (Persephone), and Peter Mulvey (Orpheus)—fronting Michael Chorney’s six-piece orchestra, with the Three Fates (Rose Polenzani, Anne Heaton, and Melissa Myers) off to the side. At the show I saw, a five-minute standing ovation left the cast awestruck. So many people are all thirsting for pure art and our cups were filled and drained. This vast experience of creativity, energy, finance, and personal discovery has taken the long road from there to here... and every step has earned Anais her current accolades. What’s next?!

www.anaismitchell.com

www.myspace.com/anaismitchell