Anaïs Mitchell’s new album Hadestown is proof that music still has the power to surprise and delight. For starters, the guest list includes some pretty well-known names, including a certain Little Folksinger and a guy best known as Bon Iver. And it’s an honest-to-god album, the kind whose songs tell a story from beginning to end—specifically, the ancient Greek myth of the poet Orpheus and his doomed quest to rescue his wife Eurydice from the underworld. In Mitchell’s hands, the familiar saga is reimagined as unfolding in a version of the U.S. that simultaneously evokes our Depression-era past, the current financial disaster (though it was written before the stock market collapse), and a post-apocalyptic future. It’s a land where people hide behind walls in a misguided attempt to preserve their “freedom” and protect their riches.
The bulk of the recording was done with producer (and sometimes DiFranco bassist) Todd Sickafoose at Brooklyn Recording studio in New York, but the lead vocals were completed all over the United States, from New Orleans to Eau Claire, WI, to Los Angeles.
From its opening notes, Hadestown is packed with irresistible melodies and the kind of plainspoken poetry that is a hallmark of Mitchell’s songwriting. It’s a love story set at a time “when the chips are down” – an epic tale on a personal scale, a saga both ancient and new, mythical and all too real.
