Anaïs Mitchell

In 2005, Anand Nayak of Acoustic Guitar called her “fearlessly emotive” and likened her songwriting skills to those of Leonard Cohen, Gillian Welch and Bob Dylan. In 2012, Nick Coleman of The Independent referred to her as “the most engaging and, in some ways, most original artist currently working in the field of new American folk music.” And in 2016, Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that she’s “a formidable songwriting talent” whose songs “address contemporary angst with uncanny vision.”

Impressive? Absolutely, but that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In 2019, the Broadway production of her folk opera “Hadestown,” based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, won a whopping eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical, with her taking home the one for Best Original Score and being nominated for Best Book of a Musical. And in 2020, as if all the previous accolades and awards weren’t quite enough, Time included the then 29-year old in the TIME100, its list of the most influential people on the planet.

Who’s the recipient of all the above attention? As tuned-in folk-music fans around New England might have guessed already, it’s singer-songwriter-playwright Anaïs Mitchell, who grew up in the Green Mountain State and has made an impact on folk and theatre that‘s nearly as impressive as the Rockies. She’s transformed from a 20-something subway busker into a 40-something global star since recording her first album in 2002, cutting seven more LPs and one EP while taking the stage at storied venues and famous festivals across the US, UK and Europe. Like fellow Vermonter and Millennial Grace Potter, she’s put her home state’s thriving music scene on the map for those who associate it with nothing beyond maple syrup, covered bridges, Ben & Jerry’s and liberal politics.

MUSICAL BEGINNINGS

Born March 26, 1981, Mitchell was named after writer Anaïs Nin, raised a Quaker and grew up on her parents’ farm in New Haven, Vermont, which is part of Addison County and had a population of about 1,300 during her childhood. Her father was a novelist and college professor, her mother was the deputy secretary of Vermont’s Agency of Human Services, and she went to Mount Abraham Union High School in Bristol before graduating from Middlebury College in 2004 with a degree in political science.

She travelled often in her youth, which introduced her to a broad variety of music and provided her with loads of globetrotting anecdotes long before she became a professional touring musician. “I traveled a lot in high school and college, because my family always valued it,” she told Casey Hurburt of NextUp in 2010. “I think they enjoyed shipping me out to different parts of the world, and then I came to enjoy it myself: Japan, Costa Rica, Europe, the Middle East. When I was in college, I studied abroad in Egypt and I did some touring with an Iraqi-American band that the State Department had hired to tour the Middle East as a sort of cultural exchange, playing 1950s rock ‘n’ roll and Arabic pop music. I sang harmony and thumped a tambourine. We played a show in Kuwait and got to listen to these beautiful Bedouin guys playing music in a tent in the desert.”

Mitchell began playing guitar and writing songs at age 17, driven by a desire to be heard and inspired by some of the leading female singer-songwriters of the late 1990s. “I’ve always loved singing, just because it feels good and natural,” she told Hurburt.” I think I started writing my own songs because I wanted to be a writer, and writing songs was one way to really be heard. You know what they say: ‘If you want to be a poet nowadays, you’d better pick up the guitar.’ When I first started writing songs, there were a lot of powerful female role models out there: Ani DiFranco, Dar Williams, Tori Amos, Indigo Girls. I loved their expressiveness, the raw emotion, and I wanted to spill my guts like that.” Her commitment to her craft became obvious five years after she began her musical journey when, in May 2003, she won the New Folk Award at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Kerrville, Texas.

FIRST ALBUMS, “HADESTOWN” BOSTON-AREA DEBUT, HADESTOWN ALBUM

Mitchell recorded and self-released her first album, The Song They Sang… When Rome Fell, in 2002 and Chicago-based Waterbug Records issued her second, Hymns for the Exiled, in September 2004. The latter disc caught the attention of Ani DiFranco, owner of Righteous Babe Records, which issued her third album, The Brightness, in February 2007. Mitchell spent much of that year on the road playing small but well-established venues including Iron Horse Music Hall and Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel.

Also in 2007, Mitchell staged seven productions of “Hadestown,” the original draft of which she wrote in 2006, at small theatres in Vermont, which turned out to be the first step in opening the flood gates to her wildly successful future. In December ‘07, she and the troupe took the musical out of Vermont for the first time, performing it at Somerville Theatre (roughly four miles from downtown Boston). “We’d created this scrappy, DIY, Vermont-based production, and we drove down in a school bus,” she told Lauren Daley of Boston magazine in 2024, noting that musical has “a deep history” in Boston because of the Somerville show, which received a glowing review in The Boston Herald.

Mitchell toured extensively over the next couple of years, including a multicity run across Europe in 2008, the year that Righteous Babe issued the five-track EP Country, a collaboration between her and singer-songwriter Rachel Ries. In the spring of 2010, following Righteous Babe’s March release of her fourth album, Hadestown (which hit #9 in the Billboard Americana/Folk Albums chart), playing in the Boston area turned out to be as significant as the Somerville performance had been a few years before thanks to an iconic venue in Cambridge “When the studio record came out in 2010, I was trying to figure out how to tour with it,” she told Daley. “I did some shows with one of my orchestrators and his band, but it was just me singing every song. When we decided to do a show in Boston, I thought, ‘I have so many friends around there. I wonder if I could get them to sing the roles.’ There’s such a strong music community in Boston – artists who show up for each other – so we did that at Club Passim in [April] 2010. There were more people on the stage than in the audience, but it blew things wide open, and we went on to recreate that show all over. It was because of Boston that it felt possible.”

LATER ALBUMS, “HADESTOWN” GOES GLOBAL, BROADWAY DEBUT

Mitchell founded her own label, Wilderland Records, in 2012 and released her fifth album, Young Man in America, in February of that year. The LP reached #13 in the Billboard Americana/Folk Albums chart, and later in the year she opened for Ben Iver’s on the North American leg of his tour, which included two sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Wilderland released her seven-song album Child Ballads, a collaboration with singer-songwriter Jefferson Hamer, in February 2013; it made it to #20 in Billboard’s Americana/Folk Albums chart and won a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best Traditional Song (“Willie of Winsbury”). In September 2014, the year Mitchell debuted at the Newport Folk Festival, Wilderland issued her seventh disc, the stripped-down, 15-track xoa, which includes three new songs and 12 from previous LPs, all recorded with guitar and vocals only.

On May 6, 2016, a decade after Mitchell had written the first draft and composed the original score, “Hadestown” debuted in New York City, though it didn’t make it to Broadway until nearly three years later. Directed by Obie Award winner and Tony Award nominee Rachel Chavkin, the first performances in the Big Apple were at the New York Theatre Workshop, an off-Broadway venue in Manhattan’s East Village, and the show ran through July 31. The musical’s next Chavkin-directed runs were at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Alberta (November 13 through December 3, 2017) and Royal National Theatre in London (November 13, 2018 through February 21, 2019).

Preview performances began on Broadway on March 22, 2019 at the Walter Kerr Theatre, and opening night was April 17, with Chavkin directing. The New York Times called the folk opera “inventive, beguiling and spellbinding,” Vogue magazine said it “will be your new theatre obsession” and by January 2023 “Hadestown” had been performed a record 918 times at the Walter Kerr, beating the previous record holder “Proof.” In addition to it winning eight Tony Awards, the cast of the Broadway show won the Grammy for Best Musical Theatre Album in 2020, the same year that Penguin Books’ Plume imprint published Mitchell’s Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown, in which she explains her inspiration for writing the musical and the decade-long process of developing it. “Hadestown” had a six-day, seven-show run at The Hanover Theatre and Conservatory in Worcester in March/April 2023 and – in a homecoming of sorts given the 2007 Somerville Theatre show’s significance – a six-day, eight-show run at Boch Center Wang Theatre in Boston in April 2024.

BONNIE LIGHT HORSEMEN, LATEST ALBUM, POSSIBLE “HADESTOWN” FILM

In 2019, Mitchell co-formed the trad-folk group Bonny Light Horsemen with multi-instrumentalist Eric D. Johnson and guitarist Josh Kaufman. The band’s recorded three albums – 2020’s self-titled debut, 2022’s Golden Rolling Holy and 2024’s Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free – and Mitchell says being in the trio has helped her stay fresh creatively. “I was in so deep with ‘Hadestown’ for so long, and I had a hard time writing my ‘own songs’ during that time [because] I felt like that was ‘cheating’ on the [musical],” she told Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers of Acoustic Guitar in 2020. ”When I started working with Josh and Eric on these very old songs and adaptations, it felt like, ‘Hey, here’s a thing I can do!’ It felt intuitive, easy even, and very inspiring to dive back into the very old lines, the very old images. It’s water from a deep well.”

Mitchell recorded her eighth and latest solo album in 2021 and BMG released it in January 2022. Reviews for the self-titled 10-track disc were effusive from all corners of the world, with Mojo, The Guardian, The Evening Standard and The Sydney Morning Herald giving it four stars and The Telegraph giving it a full five. Asked if she’d like to see “Hadestown” turned into a movie one day, she said she would, but only when the timing’s right. “I would love that,” she told Boston’s Lauren Daley in 2024. “There was a lot of interest right after we went to Broadway, but it didn’t feel right. I would love, at the moment when it’s right, that it’s its own animal, and doesn’t feel like it’s trying to recreate what’s happening on stage. So, I’m enjoying letting time go by.”

(by D.S. Monahan)