Getting to Know. . . ANAIS MITCHELL
 by Kathy S-B  ·  4 September 2007

Anais Mitchell is one of the most engaging new talents in acoustic music today. Raised on a sheep farm in Vermont and having traveled the world, she brings an intense journalistic viewpoint to her songwriting. Her latest CD, “The Brightness,” highlights Mitchell’s distinctive vocals with her amazingly insightful and mature lyrics. Check out this video of her performing “Hobo’s Lullaby.” For the uninitiated, there is much to learn and love about her music. Her website includes all kinds of information including the lyrics to her songs and many very cool links that will give you a glimpse into this very righteous babe.

The thing that I love about your music is that you are not afraid to take on some incredibly large topics like war and the Patriot Act and you do it in such a touching and meaningful way that it’s impossible not to listen to what you are saying. What’s the first word that comes to your mind when you think about the planet earth in 2007?

Oh, my god. just one word? hmm… VERTIGO

Your song “Two Kids” haunts me. Some of the lyrics:

my daddy’s house is the safest of houses
he sealed up the windows so no air gets in
and there’s plenty of campbell’s and beers in the basement
in case we can’t get to the store or something
and my daddy told me that some people hate us
they even hate me, and i’m just a kid.

What’s the story behind this song?

I started writing “two kids” while I was living in Egypt. I had wanted it to be a story from the point of view of an American child and an Iraqi child but I was having trouble with the Iraqi verse, I sort of felt unqualified to write it. A friend and I were traveling through Northern Syria and we stopped at the cheapest hotel in the Lonely Planet guidebook. The proprietor was a beautiful old man who saw my guitar and figured at once we were kindred spirits — he was a poet — he took down some old chapbooks from the shelf and began reading his poems to us in Arabic and English. I told him about the song I was writing and since he lived close to the Iraqi border, close enough to have picked up the dialect, he said he would write the verse of the Iraqi child in dialect. He actually wrote pages and pages I could never have used the whole thing — but that second verse is the very beginning of the poem he wrote from the point of view of an Iraqi child.

There seems to be a theme in your songs of the loneliness of people, kind of like 21st century interpretations of “Eleanor Rigby.”

Yep… a kind of nostalgia, too, shows up a lot on “The Brightness.” It has to do with the feeling of having been born too late or too soon, arriving on a scene or in a town whose “moment” has come and gone. There you are looking for the poets, and there are none. You’re going among the ghosts. and that same feeling applied to another person’s heart. you could have sworn there was a spark, but it’s gone now.

Kudos on being signed to Ani DiFranco’s record label, Righteous Babe. After growing up listening to Ani’s work this deal must have felt very surreal to you

Surreal is a good word! Some of the first songs I learned on the guitar were Ani Difranco songs. I don’t think anyone has exerted the kind of cultural influence on my generation that Ani Difranco has. It’s an honor. I also have great respect for the label itself, the kinds of artists it supports and the way it does business.

I was quite struck by your song “Out of Pawn.” It’s very poignant the way you tell the story of a man’s romance being out of control much like the crazy spinning nature of New Orleans during Katrina. I understand that you wrote this song after hanging out in a bar in the Ninth Ward. . . ?

Yes… it is mostly a true story. . . The bar was called “The Saturn Bar”. It’s still there but my friend says the owner passed away recently. Huh, I hadn’t thought of “uncle louie’s” romance being out of control as you say, but I can see how it could be heard that way. to me it has to do with the love of a woman being like the love of a city — that it makes one feel alive, and that it won’t last forever. When I set out to write the song, I so much wanted to write a big bad polemic about what happened and did not happen in the wake of Katrina, but I found the political language wouldn’t come the way it might have a couple years ago, so I ended up writing a love story set in the city before the flood.

Tell us a little about your folk opera, “Hadestown.” How did that come about? What exactly is a “folk opera”?

I think “Hadestown” is the most exciting thing i’ve every worked on, creatively. It’s an opera based on the Orpheus myth but set in a post-apocalyptic American depression-style town. It is a love story, but with a heavy dose of politics, especially surrounding the migration of people in desperate circumstances. iI has been and still is a delightful challenge to use a song-cycle to tell a story, and to try and express the pathos of these crazy, archetypal, beautiful characters who have nothing (well only a little) to do with me.

I began calling it a “folk opera” because it didn’t feel right to call it a “rock opera” and because the story involves some elements and imagery that I think resonate at a “folk” level — trains, mines, banjos, you know — but to be truthful, the score that my collaborator M. Chorney is writing for the piece could hardly be called a “folk” arrangement — it’s somewhere between show tunes, jazz, and “art music”. The show is going up in its second incarnation in Nov./Dec. of this year and we plan to make a studio recording in early 2008. Make a road trip!