I had travelled to see Anaïs Mitchell on the strength of Hadestown — a really remarkable album, a folk opera about the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a ‘post-apocalyptic Depression-era America.’ (The website is worth a look for the libretto and Anaïs’s story of the show’s development). I was slightly disappointed that it was going to be a solo show, because I regretted not going to see it performed as an ensemble during January’s Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow (due to prohibitive CC prices), and the orchestral and jazz arrangements of Michael Chorney, as well as the contributions of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Ani di Franco and Greg Brown, really make the album for me. And I wasn’t particularly enthused by Anaïs’s solo albums, which are pleasant enough, but seemed to lack the depth and weight of her songwriting and performance as Eurydice on Hadestown.
My preconceptions were overturned however—it was a great set, with Anaïs— large-eyed and smiley, wearing holey cowboy boots—a captivating performer. I found her solo versions of ‘The Wall,’ ‘Wedding Song’ and ‘Hadestown’ as foot-tappingly enjoyable as on the album, but was astounded that ‘Eurydice’s Song’ —which she was nervous about playing without a string section— and ‘If It’s True’ —sung on record by Justin Vernon as Orpheus—were even better than on the album. With only guitar and her voice, the tragedy of these songs, and of the whole piece, really rang out. As she writes, ‘The real moral of Hadestown to me is, yes, we’re fucked, but we still have to try with all our might. We have to love hard and make beauty in the face of futility.’
As well as songs from Hadestown, she did a lovely version of Nic Jones's 'The Humpback Whale' and played some of her new material - mostly in the folk storytelling vein, grief and magic flickering on songs’ edges. Not often playing solo these days, she was unsure about which songs to do and sought requests from the audience. There were calls for songs off her 2004 and 2007 records, Hymns for the Exiled and The Brightness. She described ‘Old-Fashioned Hat’ –as one of her few happy love songs’ – written for her ‘sweetheart in America, who plays bass in a Honky Tonk band called J.P. Harris and The Tough Choices – he’s one of the Tough Choices’: ‘I used to scratch my poems / on the backs of other lovers in / the darkness of my mind / back before I made my home / in the marrow of your bones’. This is all very much ‘girls with guitars and hearts on sleeves’, but the lyrics resonate much more when performed live than on the record, in this and the other love songs from her earlier albums, such as ‘Cosmic American’ or ‘Namesake.’
Maybe it’s the power of live music, or a voice that has become richer in the intervening few years, perhaps related to a confidence that comes through succeeding with a project as complex and collaborative as Hadestown – but hearing these songs in the hush of an Edinburgh cabaret bar, Anaïs Mitchell is more comparable to Joni Mitchell than to Jewel. I found myself welling up during ‘I Wear Your Dress,’ a song for her grandmother, about the connection to female forebears whose experience as young women was so different to now: ‘this is just to tell you that I wear your dress sometimes / the one you made with the gold brocade and the empire waistline / you fitted to your figure when it looked just like my own / that was jersey in the fifties, and the women stayed at home [...] I wear it down to the bar in town and dance around all night / talking and joking, swearing and smoking like any stranger in a crowd / and nobody stares, nobody cares to tell me I’m not allowed- I am allowed.’
PS - Some of the gig has been uploaded by a kind dude here on Youtube.
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