Anaïs Mitchell - Between Hades and the Light

It can't be easy carrying a surname like that if you're a musician. Even more so if you're a woman, a singer-songwriter, you pick up a guitar, and your age could plausibly put you in the position of being the daughter of a far more celebrated namesake, one who rewrote the rules of songwriting — and not only for women. Perhaps it's precisely thanks to this namesake, to this odd quirk of fate, but part of that burning spirit that animated the divine Joni decades ago must have poured into Anaïs Mitchell, who over the past decade has proven to be one of the most compelling and passionate voices in American song. It's that same voracious curiosity, that same urge to constantly question herself, to measure herself against tradition (and not only tradition) and bend it to her own deep sensibility, that represents the true strength shared by both artists. A strength that, from her tentative beginnings on guitar, has gradually allowed the fair-haired American songwriter to travel through space and time, between the taverns of 1960s New Orleans and the deepest Midwest, through the enchanted woods of Britain, and why not, even within herself, blending introspection with a “popular” outlook into a portrait that has helped restore, among the many who have tried, the original meaning of “folk”. But let's take things in order.

Acoustic Stornelli for the Fall of Rome

After all, a passion for art must have been instilled in the singer-songwriter, as in the most idyllic of family portraits, from childhood. Born and raised in Vermont — a state that certainly doesn't shine for fame or coolness among the fifty stars of the American flag (and whose moment of greatest glory probably came courtesy of jam-rockers Phish) — the daughter of a university professor and novelist, we'd like to believe it was precisely his influence that guided the infant's first steps into the gilded rooms of literature and human genius, opening the door to unknown universes.

Besides, the name she carries, a tribute to the Franco-American writer Anaïs Nin, is worth far more than a fleeting guess — it almost seems to have predestined her future. A future that, between the family farm and frequent trips around the world (which also took her to the Middle East and Latin America), began to take shape, to assume a concrete form toward the end of the last century, when a seventeen-year-old Anaïs, guitar in hand, began writing her first songs. It would take a few more years before those small, intimate monologues received a well-deserved recording, the “imperishable” testimony of her passage through this planet. It's unclear how much of those private endeavors eventually found their way into the writing of the album, but the fact remains that The Song They Sang When Rome Fell, released in 2002, faithfully reflects the domestic setting in which the songs were conceived.

Recorded in a single day, written in its entirety and self-produced by Mitchell, The Song They Sang When Rome Fell reveals an artist who, while still green, already possesses a solid melodic instinct and an irreverent, instinctive style of writing, one guided more by the artist's sensibility than by any real compositional plan. It's precisely the strong narrative streak, the touch of the modern-day storyteller, that breathes life into and inspires the songwriting; rather than looking to the growing rediscovery of the Appalachian tradition (we were still a long way from the indie-folk boom that would only become mainstream a few years later), the songs seem to want to forge an ideal link with the alt-rock epic of the late millennium, a connection to the “heroines” of 90s songwriting, whose moods are preserved here more than their sonic trappings.

Tracks like “Parking Lot Nudie Bar” or “Make It Up” would have needed only the slightest injection of electricity to rank among the sweetest songs in the catalogue of a Juliana Hatfield or a Liz Phair. Likewise, Mitchell's guitar playing, more inclined to comment with a few brushstrokes of sound than to claim the lead role, acts as mere support for a voice that's lively and capricious, caught between child and adult, charming in its phrasing yet still somewhat undisciplined in its delivery (only the expressive subtlety of the brief “Orleana” hints at the Anaïs to come), one that takes up all the space available to tell its own stories.

There are very few concessions to a properly folk dimension, but in the end these turn out to be the most conventional moments of the bunch, despite all the good intentions (“Work Makes Free”, the title track).

Partly due to the album's unresolved nature, partly due to the insecurities of an artist not yet fully aware of her own abilities, The Song They Sang When Rome Fell is, in short, a collection of songs that betrays, despite a solid effort on the writing front, considerable inexperience, the awkwardness and tension of a “beginner” facing the first major test of her career. A fairly forgivable flaw, though, for a path that from this work onward will only go upward.

I could tell you stories like government tells lies…

Despite her still-immature pen, an expressiveness still in embryonic form, yet to be fully explored, praise for Mitchell wasn't long in coming, drawing attention to an emerging talent of Americana. Her participation in early themed festivals and the recognition that followed (notably a win at the Kerrville Folk Festival, an important Texas showcase dedicated to discovering and launching new folksingers) built up a small following around her name, a circuit that would pave the way for her first proper record deal. A deal that would come about through the interest of Andrew Calhoun's Waterbug Records, which would release her second album, finally free to blossom.

Hymns For The Exiled, released in September 2004, confirms the clear growth of its author, who still favors an intimate artistic dimension built around voice and guitar (and little else), but now with a wholly different kind of confidence, a more world-wise approach that's also more demanding of her own songwriting. The legacy of her Nineties alt-rock icons fades away (much of the "rock" charge, latent or otherwise, disappears), the dynamics become far more ordered, and above all, the folk imprint becomes truly dominant, a path to follow rather than a device to dip into every now and then.

The choice pays off in full, even if, given the record's thematic premises, it was really the only road available. As the title suggests, these "Hymns for the Exiled" are songs that are thoroughly popular not just in their writing and musical choices, but also in conception, in their lyrical profile, which starts to bear the decisive mark of Anaïs's political views, sharply critical of the Bush administration's conduct. The guitar picking, wavering and austere, uses the strength of its progressions almost exclusively to sketch out songs that, besides a tangible expressive urgency, show a greater degree of elaboration, in whatever sense one wants to take that word. And even though her pen, undoubtedly sharper now, still often struggles to truly leave a mark, the richness of the messages it conveys clears that hurdle without too much trouble, giving rise to a cycle of songs in which Mitchell genuinely earns her own space.

Stories of everyday hardship and pain, of irreplaceable losses (the little gem "Orion", a moved tribute to a musician friend who passed away), of disastrous political choices and memories spanning an entire life (the childhood snapshot "Two Kids", free of any mawkishness thanks to the subtle drama that bends the author's voice) set fire to melodies that need little else (just a few string flourishes in "Quebreek Flood", a dash of bass beneath the mournful melancholy of "A Hymn For The Exiled") to get straight to the point, and look at the whole world with ardent, passionate eyes, even from the small shutters of a home window. The search for her lost style is gradually coming together.

Flashes of Brilliance

Her early work and her breakthrough among up-and-comers at the 2003 Kerrville Folk Festival earned Mitchell a certain standing within the circuit of young alternative singer-songwriters and, more significantly still, the trust of Ani DiFranco, always on the hunt for pure talent to bring into the fold of her ever-lively Righteous Babe.

The first fruit of this new, more intense stretch of her career would be The Brightness, written alongside the first draft of the folk opera "Hadestown" and released on the Buffalo label in 2007. Given the pivotal role it played and the quality of its craftsmanship, The Brightness deserves a place among Anaïs's essential records. It's the portrait of a genuine, passionate, infectious artist, capable of lighting up folk textures devoted to restraint thanks to the clarity of her distinctive, remarkably fresh, childlike voice.

As suggested by the first emblematic tracks, "Your Fonder Heart" and "Of A Friday Night", the American singer comes across as extraordinarily communicative, direct and rather convincing in keeping the excesses of her temperament, or the naivety of her twenty-five years, in check.

What strikes you first is the successful mix of confidence and balance that, in her previous releases, had never gone beyond commendable intentions. Here Anaïs instead shows she has shaken off all shyness and wants to let ever broader glimpses of her personality surface without hesitation, while still favoring registers with a markedly introspective bent.

What still makes the best impression, though, is once again her warm and enthusiastic delivery, truly invaluable in preserving a kind of singing brimming with wonder from the risks of mannerism, of affected posturing and the staleness of clichés as overused as they are worn out. The template remains anchored to the voice-and-guitar formula, shaped at its best (as on Hymns for the Exiled) by the trusted hand of arranger and producer Michael Chorney, essential both behind the console and in the sparing instrumental touches scattered here and there with deliberate decorative intent: besides the piano, played with care by Mitchell herself, occasional guests also step in, including a baritone sax that smooths out the rough edges and adds further color, a hammond organ, a lap steel, and Ben Campbell's banjo, responsible for the pronounced traditional aroma of "Shenandoah" as well as the lively duet with the six-string that, on "Hobo's Lullaby", is built entirely on tones of radical bareness (bordering on Naturalism, aided by a decidedly vibrant viola) and dedicated to the imagery of drifters and to Woody Guthrie's song of the same name. Moments like these retain the simple charm of watercolors, delicate yet reinvigorating, proof that the smiling girl from Vermont needs no grand means to truly enchant, and that an intimate, almost domestic dimension like the one just described suits her particularly well.

Moving with surprising grace, barely dancing on the nylon strings, Anaïs sets the ideal conditions for reaching the listener's heart with nothing more than the suggestions of her candid, crystalline voice, foreign to any mask. At times she shows restraint, held back almost to a whisper, yet always delightfully warm and confiding. That's the case with "Old-Fashioned Hat", a marvelous little gem and the stage on which Mitchell the miniaturist operates, extremely skilled in tending to detail, to the faintest nuance, without losing an ounce of her incredible visceral quality or of her own peculiar fragrances. Nonetheless, our artist also confirms an excellent sense of timing in alternating more striking moments with pauses and silences of undeniable emotional charge ("Changer" is exemplary), a gift clearly picked up from her mentor and patron Ani.

The songs on The Brightness shine like fragments of an impetuous stream of consciousness, disciplined into a form of plainspoken poetry halfway between a diary and a piece of street journalism, two of Mitchell's great youthful passions: small vignettes, stories of love and life that speak of suspended wonders, solitudes, vanished poets, rooms and windows thrown open to welcome the moonlight and, alongside it, the unreachable magnetism of nocturnal inspiration. The album thus takes on the shape of a collection of snapshots taken not with a camera but with pen and ink, leaving just the right amount of room for a kind of storytelling as pungent as few others, one that implicitly pays tribute to the aforementioned Guthrie, to the most famous writer of the same name (obviously Anaïs Nin, a ghostly presence in "Namesake") and to post-Katrina New Orleans ("Out of Pawn"). The prize for best lyric, however, goes to "Song of the Magi", where the familiar nativity-scene imagery of Christ's birth loses any glossy sheen through a bitter inversion into the brutal reality of our present day:

Welcome home, my child

up against the wall

Her storytelling gifts, already evident before, earn her extra points here. There's a notable excerpt from that "Hadestown" which, over the course of 2007, would be rewritten and staged multiple times. It's the dialogue steeped in eros and thanatos titled "Hades & Persephone", interesting for its honesty as a rough (not even remotely) draft, already brimming with that same expressive exuberance, here sketched with real personality by its author and sole performer, who would later return to it in a new guise titled "How Long?" on the following album. A promise, then, still carrying the alluring vagueness of pure possibility, destined to become a true masterpiece for Anaïs only three years later, with a far more fitting array of resources and performers (in the new version, handling this particular song, were Ani DiFranco and Greg Brown).

In the present tense of The Brightness there was no sensational stroke of genius, but there was the serenity of an artist finally aware of her own luminous gift. A "coming-of-age" chapter, then, undoubtedly transitional but still valuable for capturing ideas that were already highly significant. The work of a singer-songwriter in the final stages of her personal search for a style, far less fragile than in the past, and admirable in her refusal to rush things, giving shape to her own artistic sensibility in a gently intimate record, just like her.

Our Lady of Hades

Once you've arrived and unpacked your bags, all that's left to do is make the surrounding environment more welcoming, tailored to your own sensibility and your own being, so that the adjoining spaces become the most faithful mirror of their inhabitant. And if that means losing yourself along the way, shutting yourself off for a moment in your own self before opening up eagerly to the world, so be it: the satisfaction of having finally conquered your own natural space will be tenfold, especially when the legs of the journey have proven so stimulating and rewarding. Before that settling-in takes place, though, we need to take a step back, to two years before the infernal citadel took shape on stage, updating the Orphic myth to the era of Hurricane Katrina.

The Anaïs Mitchell of 2008 is, in fact, a singer-songwriter now fully established in the field; magazines and webzines, even non-specialist ones, had begun to notice her and count her among the female artists to watch, alongside a Marissa Nadler and a Joanna Newsom. The reissue of Hymns For The Exiled and the release of the brief Country Ep thus cement the musician's rise to prominence, closing out a fruitful and successful season for the Vermont songwriter.

In cahoots with Rachel Ries, a shy and low-key figure of American folk, the five songs on Country Ep, as the title suggests, move with great knowledge and tact within the country universe, a world Mitchell had never really approached until that point. Indeed, a certain underlying conventionality runs through all the songs on the record (particularly "Come September" and its well-worn chord progression), yet what still stands out is writing that hits the mark, incisive even in these intimate duets (with Ries's fuller vocals taking the lion's share of the spotlight, leaving Anaïs to handle the backing vocals), songs that paint "O My Star"'s Americana with romantic hues, surrender defenselessly to tradition on "Grace The Fall", and speak from the bottom of the heart on "When You Fall".

Beyond the record's strong (perhaps excessive) familiarity of ingredients, the two musicians' impromptu collaboration highlights their shared versatility of approach, a quality that, above all, hints at just how much Mitchell still has in store for her audience.

Everything, in fact, is now set for the launch of her most ambitious work yet, a project able to combine music, literature and theatre, standing out for its remarkable accessibility and a total absence of heaviness, which makes it surprisingly popular in the noblest sense of the word. Drama and passion, opera and Greek choruses, New Orleans and the American crisis: this and much more animates Hadestown, the so-called "folk opera" that definitively catapults its creator into the pantheon of the decade's most important folk songwriters. The work was born as a theatrical musical performed by Vermont actors (director Ben Matchstick, arranger Michael Chorney and producer Todd Sickafoose), for which Mitchell wrote all the songs and lyrics, giving life to a substantial, choral dramatic work that sets the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a modern Western city.

In our vision, though, Hades is the Land of Toys we're convinced we live in, where hunger and poverty are pushed away behind a dividing wall. Hades is the world of the dead that survives by eating and ignoring what lies beyond the wall, the world of the living, where, paradoxically, people die of hunger and of virtue (Orpheus's music). There's the economic crisis, there's Obama, there are wars over raw materials, there are the struggles of artists, but none of this is ever cited explicitly. The young Vermont songwriter offers a contemporary portrait that, had it been seen in the nineteenth century, would have been met with an "what an apocalyptic future awaits us". Indeed: Anaïs interprets the cultural/moral crisis we're living through via the narrative boxes of a Greek myth, filling them with negative elements that revolve around basic ideas - love/hate, hunger/abundance, inclusion/separation. The ending is well known: forget about a happy one.

Nonetheless, the harshness of these themes melts away from the very first listen through the album, because the songs are beautifully crafted pop, the sounds and arrangements for many instruments give variety to the listening experience, and the different voices involved mark out the story. Hades is played by Greg Brown (cavernous yet almost fatherly voice on "Hey Little Songbird"), Eurydice is Anaïs (moving on "Flowers"), Orpheus is Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver (hear the tenderness of "Epic 1 and 2"), their friend Hermes (played by Ben Knox Miller of The Low Anthem) accompanies them in a few episodes (the best: the vaudeville number "Way Down Hadestown"), and so does Ani DiFranco as Persephone (wonderful on "Our Lady From The Underground"). Then there are the three Fates of Hades, representing the voice of the people, echoing the light, swinging, playful style of the Andrews Sisters or the more modern Puppini Sisters (our favourite: "When The Chips Are Down").

Brass, piano, ragtime, acoustic guitar, banjo, strings, samples of city noises, American tradition, country, jazz, gospel, musical theatre. Anaïs manages to craft a pinpoint, creative, convincing folk-pop chamber opera, even amid its obvious genre references and its abundance of material (across the album's 20 tracks, at least a dozen are gorgeous songs, while others are scene-setting "filler"). The record, in short, forces you to pause your daily rush and set aside nearly an hour to listen from start to finish, only to then ask yourself what that famous finish line really is, if not the city of Hades itself.

Backed by a critical consensus rarely so unanimous these days in declaring a work's worth, even if far from the commercial favour enjoyed by other independent artists such as Newsom, Fleet Foxes or the Decemberists, Hadestown takes on, with rare courage and extraordinary results, centuries of American cultural heritage, transfigured through a literary framework that further elevates its qualities. Very few had dared go this far, and even fewer had come away with such a resounding triumph.

On the Side of the People

Another two years pass before the songstress returns to show off her art, taking to the stage again bolstered by the support of a critical establishment now literally at her feet, and by a considerably larger audience. The risk of overreaching, given this extraordinary run of favour, was real, but the ambitious Anaïs, defying expectations, wrong-foots everyone once again. Determined to go it alone, giving up the backing of Righteous Babe and of an Ani DiFranco who had literally propelled her into the pantheon of contemporary songwriting, she founds her own label, Wilderland, and through it releases her fifth album, on which the political drive becomes even more pronounced and impossible to ignore.

If the splendid folk opera Hadestown had managed, in its intricate construction, to transfigure the Orphic myth and transplant it among the dive bars of New Orleans and the mountains of its homeland, within a sense of looming apocalypse that alluded to the current, unfortunate collapse of Western civilization's certainties, now, in the year of the end of the world, comes Young Man In America, an album that shows Mitchell in a surprisingly stripped-down light compared to her recent past, though no less ambitious in narrative terms. The musical is over, the players have packed their instruments back into their cases, and the infernal city has sunk once more into the depths of the Earth. Yet the memory of that grand production remains vivid, a muffled but indelible trace that has inevitably left its mark on the making of this latest work. Without the powerful allegories that once transposed the thematic content of the songs into a lofty (if intense) remove, her fifth effort tells of a young American man's struggle to find his way in an America gripped by crisis, a life made of poverty, hardship and relentless despair.

A country adrift, one that lost its way long ago and doesn't even seem to want to find it again: the protagonist of this narrative in eleven acts has no hesitation in hurling heavy accusations at his homeland ("Wandrin' in the wilderland, look upon your children, wandrin' in the woods," he sings in the opening track), which carries on, unmoved, indifferent to the cries of its children.

Weighed down by his difficult condition, our hero dreams of a more genuine, more human nation: in a sense, through his words, he revives the myth of an Edenic America, distant in time and space, one to daydream about. The reason behind such pronounced classicism, in the furrow of the great American folk song tradition, soon becomes clear. The subjects of the songs (titles like "Tailor" and "Shepherd," the latter inspired by a story her father wrote thirty years ago, are anything but accidental) capture snapshots of folk characters given new life, another chance to tell their own story, and values buried under heaps of neglect. Traditional folk, the folk that has immortalized centuries of American history, thus becomes the favored vehicle through which the songwriter entrusts her thoughts and confessions, seasoning them with a vibrant, incisive vocal delivery that, beneath its childlike echoes of Joanna Newsom, conceals an unusual severity.

The arrangements, too, turn severe and measured: the restrained plucking of the guitar, occasionally replaced by piano (in the muffled advance of "Coming Down"), hazy string beds, and finally an indistinct choral quality merely accompany and steer the decisive cut of the writing, more evident here than ever. But it's at this level that a certain fatigue shows through: an innate interpretive class (clearly on display in the first two tracks, overall the best of the bunch) and the limpid musical flourishes sometimes fail to mask the lack of melodies up to the task, songs that, besides their gripping lyrical urgency, also call for a musical frame of equal intensity. The vaguely electric easy listening of "Venus," the record's true odd one out, the drowsy mantra of the closing "Ships" (the one moment where a distant possibility of hope seems to peek through), as well as the measured country lilt of "You Are Forgiven," all attest to a songwriter of undeniable temperament grappling, this time, with a legacy she doesn't quite know how to make the most of.

Credit must nonetheless be given to a songwriter who keeps questioning herself, one of the finest (and most ambitious) female talents of recent years, a talent that, however dimmed, still manages to send out great, at times truly great, flashes of brilliance.

Among England's Woods

Unstoppable, ever more eager to learn and to dig deeper into the traditions and languages of past and present, Mitchell released, just a year after the second release on her own personal label, another work that finds her once again grappling with something noticeably off the beaten path. The Vermont songwriter had in fact long harbored the desire to put out a work of this kind, and a few statements to that effect had already surfaced before the recording of her previous solo album. After that, the collaboration with roots-folk singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jefferson Hamer, who had already worked alongside her on other occasions, together with a painstaking process of research and selection, did the rest, allowing the musician to bring to life an idea she had been holding onto for a long time.

With that said, what kind of record is Child Ballads? Those more in the know will likely have already solved the riddle; for everyone else, suffice it to say that the "Child" tacked on like an epithet doesn't refer to infants struggling to fall asleep, but to the scholar and philologist Francis James Child, who spent part of his life critically studying and recovering the folk ballads of various nations, including those of the British Isles, gathered and catalogued in a monumental collection. And it is precisely from this vast archive, this rich songbook that many artists before them have drawn on as a source of inspiration (from Bob Dylan to Fairport Convention and on to Fleet Foxes) that the American duo draws, having, after a careful reading of the hefty anthology, selected seven of the three hundred and five catalogued ballads and reshaped them to their own artistic ends, in a precious act of reinterpretation that leaves the arcane evocative power of the originals completely untouched. Appropriately rearranged and reworked, these ballads instead show just how much they still have to say to the present, and how much they can still captivate an audience not necessarily well-versed in the language of folklore, especially in the accessible form Mitchell and Hamer have given them.

There is no resort here to electronic instrumentation or any eccentric compositional trick: the two musicians have remained entirely faithful to the austerity of the original canon, pairing refined vocal harmonies with the plucking of their acoustic guitars, and nothing else, thereby preserving the ballads' untouched, if not magical, atmosphere. It is mostly in the choice to modernize the language, moving from the antique hues of archaic English to contemporary speech, that one senses the record's outreach-minded effort, aimed at introducing a potentially unfamiliar audience to a world wrapped in the mists of time, where reality and imagination are not so far apart after all.

Needless to say, the effort pays off handsomely: the melodic patterns underpinning Anglo-Saxon folk ballads, repeated constantly and consistent with themselves throughout each song, in this brief anthology (just under forty minutes of music) succeed perfectly in transporting the listener into their enchanted world, made of tragic twists of fate, tales of rise and fall, inescapable destinies and supernatural creatures.

Without getting into a close analysis of the individual tracks (a rather sterile exercise on this occasion), one need only look at the closing "Tam Lin," its structure and pacing completely reworked compared to such storied renditions as those by Fairport Convention or Current 93, or the enchanting duet of "Geordie" (recast here in a more subdued, "domestic" key, yet no less expressive than the incredible version by our own Fabrizio De André) to see just how much genuine craftsmanship here goes hand in hand with a whole dimension of personal reworking and research, which makes a record like this both an individual and a collective story at once.

In these seven reinterpretations, Anaïs Mitchell, reconnecting with the deepest musical customs of a far-off ancestral homeland (after all, it is from perfidious Albion that many of the first colonists descended), proves able to handle the evocative vocabulary of English folk with real command, without ever distorting its essence or looking at it through a tourist's eye.

Not even pregnancy could stop Mitchell's creative drive, or, on this occasion, it would be more accurate to call it her reworking drive. A little over a year after her last release, the time came for the songwriter to look back. To take stock of what had been accomplished, to revisit the formative moments of her journey, to reread the pages of her own life's diary, and above all, to pay tribute to all those people who, over the years, believed in and supported her work. And it is especially around this last intention that the idea behind Xoa (2014) revolves, an album conceived as a kind of personal thank-you, a testament of sincere gratitude addressed to those who have followed her exploits and ongoing evolution over the years. For once, a record that can comfortably be called "for fans," without any thinly veiled derogatory undertone diminishing its actual worth.

Reducing the listening experience offered by this record to a handful of "mere" self-covers (however carefully chosen) would not do justice to a work driven by a sense of purpose far more complex and structured than its fleeting surface might suggest. Also because, scattered here and there, some unreleased material also surfaces, blended so seamlessly into the context that it melts perfectly into it. Reassembled with nothing but acoustic guitar (the experience with Jefferson Hamer proved fruitful in this respect), stripped of the imaginative theatricality and the rougher-edged spirit that respectively defined Hadestown and Young Man In America, the new versions of the songs largely upend the original material: still recognizable, but cast in a wholly different light, an angle from which to grant them an entirely new identity.

The concept is anything but figurative: with Hades' cheering band gone, songs originally meant for joyous, ironic group singing take on, in the light of Anaïs's scornful, playful delivery, an entirely different kind of power, a personality that is nothing short of unprecedented, heightened by an expressive leanness that brings out both message and writing. One could pass off "Why We Build The Wall" and "Our Lady Of The Underground" as brand-new songs without much trouble, really. Just as notable are the reworkings of tracks from the following album, which bring out a character and a wit that had largely gone unexpressed the first time around: the title track of her previous solo record shines even brighter than its already fine original, and even a relatively minor episode like "You Are Forgiven" vibrates on sharper, more decisive frequencies, revealing an unsuspected depth in the writing.

In the end, on this front she's had very little to complain about throughout her career: once she'd swiftly moved past her first tentative efforts, from The Brightness onward (represented here through a surprising reworking of "Your Fonder Heart") her path has navigated with ease and genuine devotion through the most disparate registers, blending political fervour with intimate refinement, a sense of tradition with subversive clarity, whenever necessary. This new collection only reaffirms that point with conviction. If it has a reason to exist, it's in the transfiguration and simultaneous fortification of a body of work that can boast a plasticity which remains, at this point, more a unique than a rare case.

Just a simple treat for fans, then? Even if one were to view it that way, calling it a minor chapter, a stopgap release, would be at best misguided. The material's adaptability bares its claws without hesitation, shielding Mitchell from easy accusations of a premature beginning of the end.

At this point, all that's really left to wonder is what she intends to offer up for our attention in the years to come.

Musicals and supergroups

These very years, in fact, would be spent formalising a dream already latent in the studio version of Hadestown, but one that until then had lacked the means to grow as it deserved. With the album's expressive core expanded and reworked for adaptation to a theatrical setting, the author's folk-opera (a splendid cast recording saw the light of day in 2019) reaches its natural dimension, the stage, where it breathes new life into the Greek myth through a rich, distinctly American, popular sensibility. Debuting at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2016, the musical, quickly bolstered by glowing reviews, toured the United States before soon landing in Canada and the United Kingdom too. It's an absolute triumph, an energy (also backed by Rachel Chavkin's skilled direction) that leads the show not only to the stages of Broadway but to winning no fewer than 8 Tony Awards, a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album, and a special mention for Mitchell as one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2020.

With such success, one might be forgiven for letting it go to one's head. Yet if there's one gift that has always set the author apart, it's her deep humility, a discretion that, during the years away from her main path, also leads her to embrace her first experience as part of a group. It falls to Justin Vernon's label (Bon Iver) to launch the dream-folk trio Bonny Light Horseman, made up of Mitchell herself, Eric D. Johnson (Fruit Bats, Shins) and Josh Kaufman (Craig Finn, Josh Ritter, The National, Hiss Golden Messenger).

First performed at the Eaux Claires Festival organised by Vernon himself in Wisconsin in 2018, the spontaneous collaboration between the three musicians then evolved into a fully-fledged project. In the ten songs of Bonny Light Horseman one finds the same introverted, passionate spirit of Vernon's debut, only here everything is multiplied by three: the grace, the harmonic wit, the empathy, the spirituality, and even the fragility.

The musicians reinvent folk tradition by drawing on the Irish and British songbook in the manner of Planxty, but with the spirit of modern folk songwriters, with a lightness that moves in step with a creative sharpness perceptible in every small crevice of this pleasant and unexpected album. Conceived as a one-off project, Bonny Light Horseman's album relies on a simple, essential, almost hermetic musical language, yet one that is powerful. The crescendo of "Deep In Love" is indeed magical, its driving acoustic flow crossing ancestral melodies with fragments of folk history, never once coming across as pretentious.

Highly evocative is the duet between Johnson and Mitchell on "Jane Jane", a joyful Christmas folk song reinterpreted here with a burlesque spirit. It's again from the contrast of voices that the suggestions of timeless melodies like "Blackwaterside" or "Bright Morning Star" blossom

The band often enjoys reinventing and reshaping the past, and so from the wonders of the lyrics of "Loving Hannah" (which we recall in the splendid version by Shirley and Dolly Collins) comes "The Roving", whose melodic instinct is so strong you wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a rediscovered classic. "Magpie's Nest", on the other hand, is altered not in its musical structure but in its lyrics, partly modernised, while the rhythmic drive tends to emphasise curious similarities (Lionel Richie's "All Night Long").

On The Brooklyn Bridge

After such acclaim gathered over years of wandering far and wide across the English-speaking world, it was, in short, time for a new gathering of self, a retreat toward a more inward-looking life, a dimension devoted to contemplation. Simply titled after herself, Anaïs Mitchell marks the return to solo work after almost a decade of side projects, allowing the music to find a new breath, its natural stride. Reflective, and fittingly named after its own author, the eighth collection draws on a luminous introspection, building bridges between memory and hope with the sharpness of a single gesture, a melodic line. The impact couldn't be gentler.

It hardly matters that it's BMG releasing it, or that interest in Mitchell has markedly grown: as if renouncing the richly layered colours of her mythological adaptation, the ten sketches of the new album outline the portrait of an author eager to tell her own story, without excessive emphasis, with a modest honesty, lightly brushed by small chamber arrangements. Not that moments of pure expressive drive are lacking — a track like "Bright Star" has, in its own way, almost the texture of a classic indie-pop song — but the musician's memories favour fingertips over grand gestures, emotions received without big declarations. Everything flows, in short, with great elegance, even predictability, the summation of an expressiveness that has inevitably seized upon its own idea of classicism.

Cinematic openings full of abandon and uncertainty (a "Brooklyn Bridge" that frames the entire narrative structure), strands of Americana doubly entwined around old letters (a "Revenant" that lets slip a glimpse of Tom Petty's image), fierce reckonings with her own past ("Little Big Girl" and its torrent of words): Mitchell scrutinises and exposes herself, sparing nothing yet with innate kindness, even in recalling the illustrious departed ("On Your Way", dedicated to her late producer friend Felix McTeigue). Between glimpses of an unvarnished childhood and the prospect of a future fleeing the big cities, the author's self-titled album throws open the doors to a present full of uncertainties, yet endowed with an undeniable underlying honesty. After the descent into Hades, this was nonetheless a necessary change of perspective.

Contribution by Livia Fagnocchi ("Hadestown"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("Bonny Light Horseman").

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