Anaïs Mitchell
Anaïs Mitchell
BMG
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A new Anaïs Mitchell album will never not be an exciting prospect. One of the primary American folk voices of today, the Vermont-born musician has spent ten years focusing on a myriad of projects aside from traditional studio albums. Most notably, an eight-time Tony Award-winning musical Hadestown was born from her fourth studio LP that featured Ani DiFranco and Bon Iver in starring roles. Their careers were vastly more established than Mitchell’s circa 2010, but her clear potential and boundless vision were more than sufficient to get them on board.
Next came her last true studio album: 2012’s Young Man In America, a fully realized, occasionally merciless folk anthology, with bold and exciting production from Todd Sickafoose. Her American folk stories were so finely executed, they seemed almost to have happened in the house behind the couple in American Gothic.
Comparatively, Mitchell’s new self-titled album consists of personal tales, with tempered and lovely production by her Bonny Light Horseman bandmate Josh Kaufman, who also played a number of instruments on Taylor Swift’s highly acclaimed 2020 set folklore. Anaïs Mitchell has a similar flavor to that album.
Mitchell habitually assumes the role of narrator in her songs, particularly per her romp with Greek mythology on Hadestown. Yet, it’s more than just the association with Eurydice and co. that makes her narrative seem as though she gazes down upon the characters like a heavenly benevolent goddess. This is just as effective when coupled with these new, autobiographical fables, and perhaps is why the mellow instrumentation suits as well here as Sickafoose’s otherworldly accompaniment does with her prior works.
At all times, this is cleaner sounding than her earlier output: delicate and tame, with rarely a minor chord to speak of, leaving the listener to discover their own theatre in the non-fiction stanzas through attention. She makes use of conversational, almost nursery rhyme-like melodies, and elevates a simple chorus like that of “Little Big Girl” by expecting of the listener a deeper understanding of the lyrics. It details our storyteller coming to terms with aging: “Maybe you should face that you're ashamed to not be young… you catch your own reflection / In the window in the dark / And for a moment, it's your mama / Coming home from work / Tell her you love her / Tell her you're her.”
In a recent interview, Mitchell described these songs as “speaking to each other,” a characterization easily understood by those who have heard it. They seem to embody the same spirit and exist as a set of stories that despite being individual, feel less complete in isolation—the first time she says this has happened since the Young Man In America sessions.
This is not the biting folk epic that Young Man was, nor the high concept and expansive theatre piece Hadestown was, but a humbler half-hour by a highly creative and blossomed mother who, more than anything, presents as worldly, gentle, and wise.
Notable Tracks: “Little Big Girl” | “Now You Know” | “On Your Way (Felix Song)”
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