Is Anais Mitchell '04 the next big thing in folk music?
By Bob Gulla '83
Matching a crinkly, crimson tube top and glittery skirt to her auburn-tinted- brunette, shoulder-length hair and ruby lipstick, Anaïs Mitchell ’04 looks bewitching on stage, part siren and part waif; only her ice blue eyes offset the fiery red. She strums her acoustic guitar as the sold-out crowd at Club Passim, the legendary folk haunt in Cambridge, Massachusetts, nods along in appreciation. And then we hear her voice, a light, fresh thing, and a jolt of energy shoots through the room. This, this is something new.
Though just 26, Anaïs (a-NAY-iss)—who currently records for Righteous Babe Records, Ani DiFranco’s reputable, Buffalo-based label—has made quite a splash on the folk music scene, where she has drawn upon a wealth of life experience in crafting a familiar, yet fresh sound.
Born and raised on a sheep farm in New Haven, Vermont, Anaïs Mitchell is the child of novelist and Middlebury instructor Don Mitchell and Cheryl Warfield Mitchell, a community organizer and the former director of a center for pregnant teens. Growing up, Anaïs and her “crazy genius” older brother, Ethan, were subject to their parents’ mission: they had moved to Vermont from suburban Massachusetts to reconnect with Mother Earth. That meant no television or cell phones, just a lot of acreage, rural privacy, and, in the case of the Mitchell kids, a couple of fertile imaginations. “My brother and I spent a lot of time running naked through the woods,” Anais laughs, sitting down to a pre-show refreshment at a Cambridge café. “He read a lot of Tolkien as a kid, and we imagined our whole farm was inhabited by imaginary creatures.”
Life without television left plenty of time for music. Her father loved the folk revival artists of the ’60s—Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell—and Anaïs says that he’d focus specifically on the songwriters’ lyrics. “He’d point out great lines to me even as a little kid. To him, songwriting was a poetic and noble cause.”
Anaïs inherited that same sensibility. Using DiFranco, Sarah McLachlan, and Tori Amos as polestars, she began writing music of her own. “When I came of musical age, their music spoke to me,” says Anaïs, “all that stuff about coming into womanhood. The confessional subject matter really affected me. As a young teenager, there’s so much roiling in your mind that you want to express.”
When she arrived at Middlebury, songbook in hand, she found plenty of opportunities to expand her horizons, both as an aficionado of music and as a performing musician. “For me, college was a kind of navigation,” she says. “I needed to decide on who I was becoming.” Part of that answer came when she began working at WRMC, the College’s radio station, where she discovered shelves of new music. Another came when she realized people enjoyed her songs. “I sang at the Gamut Room and the Grille, and even though the music community was quite small, it was very supportive.”
She recorded her debut album, The Song They Sang When Rome Fell (now out-of-print), in a single afternoon in an Austin, Texas, studio. It was there that Anais also discovered the popular Kerrville (Texas) Folk Festival, which honored her with the prestigious New Folk award in 2003. Her second album, Hymns for the Exiled, demonstrated substantial growth in her songs and real eloquence when it came to describing the frictions of a country at war. On “Two Kids,” for example, she sings, “My daddy told me that some people hate us / They even hate me, and I’m just a kid / I asked how come, but he didn’t answer, so I started thinking it was something I did.”
To promote her albums, Anaïs booked her own gigs and toured anywhere she could—driving from New England to the Middle Atlantic states for a single show, if necessary. “ ‘Drive to Ohio? Sure, I’ll come to Ohio.’ I’d drive there, play a show, sleep in the car, and drive home the next day.” One night, she had a gig in Buffalo that brought out DiFranco, one of Anaïs’s girlhood icons. “It was surreal to come face to face with her.” DiFranco loved Anaïs’s act and signed the Vermonter to Righteous Babe.
In 2007, at the age of 25, Anaïs released her debut for DiFranco’s label, The Brightness. Upon its release, fans and critics tripped over themselves to find just the right words. One, writing for the influential Pop Matters Web site, wrote: “There is short supply of young songwriters with fresh faces and even fresher voices who write as intensely personal, passionate, and literate lyrics as Mitchell does … The Brightness is an album absolutely worth investigating for listeners seeking to be exposed to an engaging talent like Mitchell and willing to go an extra mile with the artist in order to gain a ‘vantage point into what makes her truly herself.’”
A reviewer for the Web site Folk and Acoustic Music Exchange was similarly impressed: “Throughout the album, Mitchell shows she is both musically and lyrically adept. For fans of good writing and understated modern folk, this is one to hear.”
Anaïs’s best songs resonate with sparse elegance. Her voice, too, is as distinct as her vision, reminiscent of unusual but inimitable singers like Gillian Welch, Iris DeMent, and Rickie Lee Jones. (One reviewer called her a cross between Shawn Colvin, Joanna Newsom, and DiFranco, herself.) Her words are wise, pointed, and shrewdly rendered. On “Out of Pawn,” she sings of the aftermath of the New Orleans flood, turning tragedy into impressionist poetry: “The sky is colored in purple and yellow / You lie on the levee with stones for pillows / And you and the girl and the city make love / With the harlequin sky up above.”
Like DiFranco, Anaïs prefers to swim against the music industry mainstream. Despite her conventional success and ascending star, she’s following up The Brightness with
Hadestown, which is what she calls a “folk opera.” Written by Anaïs and scored by Vermont-based Michael Chorney, one of her frequent collaborators, Hadestown crosses Depression-era labor politics with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a timeless fable about the power of music over death. Performed by a cast of 12 with a six-piece band in the pit, it already played to sold-out audiences in Barre, Vermont, and at the Vergennes Opera House in the winter of 2007. She envisions recording Hadestown and putting together a larger tour.
When asked about how this project fits into her overall career, Anaïs demurs, and sips herbal tea from a big ceramic mug. “How does it fit in? Oh, I don’t know. You can’t really strategize like that. You can’t manipulate your brain. Writing songs and wondering whether something’s good for my career are two different things.”
It is, she says, her chance to break free of folk conventions and create a cycle of songs that tells a story. “When I write and sing these songs I feel less like me and more like a character with something to say. I’m trying to step outside myself and tap into some of the other voices I hear.”
Bob Gulla ’ 83 is a music journalist in Wakefield, Rhode Island.
Anaïs Mitchell’s Web site can be found at www.anaismitchell.com/