By Brian Wise.
Singer/songwriter, musician and playwright Anais Mitchell had an exceptional career even before she teamed up with Josh Kaufman and Eric D. Johnson in Bonny Light Horseman five years ago. Their latest album is Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free.
While Mitchell has released eight solo albums, she developed her 2010 album Hadestown into a highly acclaimed musical which has been on Broadway and the West End and is heading for Australia later this year. One of the recent stars appearing in Hadestown was Allison Russell, on tour this April and appearing at Bluesfest.
This is where my conversation with Anais kicked off.
I was talking to a friend of yours just last week, Alison Russell.
Oh, good. God, I love Allie so much. I have known her for a long time. We go way back to her early days in the folk scene, and now she’s performing the role of Persephone in my show, Hadestown. So, it’s been a long friendship with many chapters. Is she coming to Australia?
She will be coming to Australia in March.
Great. Amazing. She’s incredible. I know she’s an incredible performer, but I didn’t know if she had any acting experience at all, and I just sort of figured she would be there as the incredible singer that she is, but she, she’s really acting. I mean, she is really bringing so much of herself and her heart and her emotions to the character totally blew me away. I think she has just a week more of shows and then she’s finishing up.
Of course she wrote a song called ‘Persephone’, didn’t she?
That’s right. There was some kind of pipeline where she wrote that song and she did a lot of touring with Hozier. She supported a bunch of his tours. Still does. A lot of his fan base came to her and really went deep with her songs. Some of them knew about Hadestown, and they started a sort of whisper campaign that Allison should be Persephone. So, it’s kind of amazing that it actually came to pass. Really beautiful.
Can you tell us about that show? It’s got such acclaim and it’s been so successful. You’ve had quite a substantial career yourself, and we should talk about that before we talk about Bonny Light Horseman. Tell us about the background to that show.
So, Hadestown is a piece of music theatre. It’s based on Greek mythology. It basically tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and also Hades and Persephone. It’s set in a kind of mythic but post-apocalyptic kind of dreamscape.
It’s a project that I started when I was in my twenties, my early twenties. I was right out of school. I was starting a career as a singer songwriter. I did a version of it in the state of Vermont where I am from and then made a studio record with some more well-known guest singers and toured with it as a kind of concert piece. Then I moved to New York City, met the director, Rachel Chavkin, kept developing it and developing it. Essentially, it was like a 12 year or 13-year process before we landed on Broadway in 2019.
So, I lived with it for so long. It really took over my whole identity creatively and I almost don’t even know what it is at this point. I put so many years into it and now it has a life of its own. I’m so grateful it’s happening in Australia now. It’s going to be in Sydney and then Melbourne and it’s on Broadway, it’s on the West end, and sometimes I don’t understand it myself, but it’s a big part of my life.
Are you going to come out here separately for those shows? For the opening? At least the premiere.
I wanted two, but I have two kids at home and I didn’t feel like I could make two trips. So, I’m just going to come for the Bonny Light Horseman tour, and I’ll see Hadestown when we’re in Sydney at the end of the tour.
So, what inspired it in the first place? Was it things that you’d been studying or things that you were quite interested in, or what was the original inspiration? Obviously spent a lot of time working on it.
I wasn’t a mythology person per se. I remember reading the Orpheus myth when I was a little kid in an illustrated children’s book of mythology, and it always spoke to me. It’s great for a musician. The hero is a musician. When I started working on it, I was right out of college. I was kind of a young. I was an idealist and a dreamer and a creative young person and coming out into the world up against the way the world is at some level.
Politically speaking, it was George W. Bush’s second term. Then of course I was like, ‘Now I have to have a job, and I have to pay the rent and things like that’. So, it felt like a coming-of-age moment for me.
I think that also is the story of Orpheus. He’s essentially this beautiful faithful dreamer that comes up against the harsh reality of the way the world is in the original mythology. That’s the underworld and you can’t get a dead person back. In this telling, it’s more like can the way the world is be changed by art or by music, or by love or by faith? It just felt like a story that kept giving.
Obviously, I worked on it for so long that by the time I was heading for Broadway, I’m at a much different life phase than I had been, but it felt like I had had a chance to really identify with other characters in the story. But it is essentially a love story, a coming-of-age story, and then something inherently political about that coming of age.
You mentioned it is set in an apocalyptic dreamscape. I think that’s what we’re in right at this very moment, isn’t it?
I know, right? It hits a little close to home.
But we don’t have to talk about that. So, you’ve had this incredibly successful musical. You’ve had eight albums of your own. Why did you feel the need to join a band?
Gosh, this band happened for me at exactly the moment that I needed it. I was definitely really focused on Hadestownand putting the point that I was heading for Broadway. It was a lot of adrenaline going on for me in terms of needing to get it right or as good as it could get. It was almost like if you’re doing a crossword puzzle and there’s three clues left, and it can’t be anything. It’s not like you’re playing in the sandbox anymore. It’s like, it’s got to be this one thing, sort of a grim kind of determination.
Then I met Josh. We were both living in Brooklyn at the time and we got together to do a session, and we realised that we both shared this love of old trad songs, especially stuff from across the pond. And we started to mess around with it and we de-tuned the guitars, so they’re all open D tuning, very wide open and kind of spacious and relaxing and soaring.
It felt like it was just like the medicine I needed. And it was the opposite thing creatively to what I was doing with Hadestown at that moment. And I met Eric through Josh. I had never met Eric, but I was a late blooming fan of Fruit Bats, his band.
When Josh suggested that we ask him if he wanted to do this project, and I was like, yes, great idea. I had no idea if I would get along with him or if our voices would sound good together or what it would be like. But that turned out to be just a really cosmic special thing to sing with him and to be in a band where I wasn’t the lead singer, but there were really two lead singers.
Sometimes Josh sings also, or sometimes it feels like he’s singing with his guitar. The guitar takes over where words leave off! That experience of collectively making music and then our larger band with JT Bates and Cameron Stone who we’re bringing to Australia, it really feels like it’s just such a healing exercise in kind of losing ourselves, shedding our own identities. Not Anais Mitchell, not Hades Town. It’s like some other thing. I’m just part of it and it feels so good. So, I feel like in a way it had to be. It was as if there was a Bonny Light Horseman shaped hole in my life and then the band came along and that’s what I needed.
Why is a Bonny Light Horseman and not men? I mean, there’s obviously more than a man in there, I guess.
Bonny Light Horseman is the title of a song. It’s a traditional song or a very old song that we put on our first record. There’s something about that combination of words that felt really beautiful. So yeah, it’s singular. It’s a singular man.
So, it’s a singular sort of creation. Is there a division of labour? I can imagine what strengths you bring to it, and Josh is in production and Eric. You each bring something different. How does the writing process work?
Well, we co-write everything. We are all getting in there on everything. Of course, we all have our little superpowers, and it feels good to lean into that sometimes. But it’s not like it always goes down the same way. It’s not like I’m writing all the lyrics or Eric’s writing all the hooks, or Josh is writing all the guitar riffs. Each song that comes will come from someone in the band as just a little nugget and then get exploded and explored and developed by the three of us. Occasionally, on this last record, there was some songs that I feel like as we’ve gotten more comfortable with each other, we can sit in a room and just throw ideas around musical lyrical. So, it’s a little less clear almost who played what role where in those songs. ‘Old Dutch is one of those from the new record that we just were kind of sitting in a room, there was a sketch.
It evolved and evolved. I do feel like I’m getting to a level of comfort with those guys with co-writing, which is a very vulnerable activity. You got to be willing to throw out ideas that are not good in order to get to the good ones. It has taken a process to get there with them to feel really, I think we all feel safe to fail and stuff. It was helpful that the first record we made was really leaning on the traditional material because it was a way in with those guys where we weren’t coming up with everything from scratch. And I sort of feel like still what we’re trying to do is write songs that are coming from the three of us coming from our lives, but they also can be in conversation with the trad stuff could feel like they came from hundreds of years ago,
Your debut album received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk album. Interestingly enough, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings won the Grammy for Best Folk Album. It broadens the notion of what folk music is all about, doesn’t it? You’re at the Port Fairy Folk Festival. So, what is folk music?
Well, I got to say, I’m so glad Gillian and Dave won that. That record is gorgeous. It’s so gorgeous. I actually was wondering if they had won that award before, because they’ve made so many beautiful records that would be deserving of it. Time The Revelator, I don’t think that was a Grammy winning album but should have been. In my world, what is folk music? I don’t know if I’m the person to answer that. I found my way into folk music by way of coffee house singer songwriter stuff. I was raised with folk music. Then in the Nineties I heard Ani DeFranco and Dar Williams and Tori Amos and this sort of Lilith Fair era female powerfully emotive singer songwriters. And I wanted to do that. I loved what could happen with just one voice, one guitar at a microphone, and just the way that that could hold the space.
That’s how I found my way into the folk world, which is really also the singer songwriter world. Then it was actually Gillian and Dave. I would say it was the Time The Revelator record that was a portal for me to the past. I fell in love with that album. That album is just full of these references from really old folk records. It was a portal for me. Then I started to get into balladry from England and Ireland and Scotland. So, I definitely come at folk music from the storytelling and the emotive singing. Eric and Josh come from the rock side of it. They would have been into the Grateful Dead and The Byrds and Zeppelin and stuff. Then they found their way to the trad by way of folk rock. So, sometimes we joke that Bonny Light Horseman is Eric’s folk band and it’s my rock band.
You talked about songwriting and ‘When I Was Younger’, which to me is one of the songs of the year last year, sounds like whoever wrote that went through it. It is so real. When I hear that song, I think of my daughter.
It’s intense, right? It’s incredible. I mean, totally. I have two kids myself and Josh actually has little twin boys that just turned four. Then he has an older daughter the same age as one of my kids. Eric doesn’t have kids. I remember when we wrote that song, it was based on the kind of a genre of songs that are about that. There’s ‘Single Girl, Married Girl,’ [the Carter Family…..’Wish I Was a Single Girl Again.’ There’s a lot of songs that kind of tap into that frustration. Eric wanted a verse for him that didn’t include the kids. So, my verse has the kids in it, the rocking of the cradle and his doesn’t. Then it just felt like we all were able to stand in our midlife crises and just sing that song from the depths of whatever. There is a lot on this whole record, I think, about midlife and just all of the ups and downs of it.
There’s some beautiful stuff. I think that’s the more tender side of being a parent, like ‘Rock The Cradle’ feels more the tenderness. Then there’s also the just abject frustration at the disfigurement of your life that happens when you become a parent. There’s definitely a lot of us in there.
I would say that it feels relieving in a way to sing a song with other people where it’s like, I’m not alone in this feeling. With our audiences they’re screaming along with us, they’re yelling along with us and they’re feeling those feelings. Also, it does kind of feel like this is a trad song. This is a feeling that people have had for hundreds of years, and they will have hundreds of years from now.
Well, there are a couple of traditional songs that have been rearranged for this album.
I’d say ‘Rock The Cradle’ is based on a trad song. Yeah, that one’s based on a lyric. Then certainly there’s bits and bobs, love and theft.
Nothing wrong with that at all. It’s a tradition, isn’t it, in folk music?
Yeah, yeah.
It’s a double album, double title. First and last song give the title. I guess you didn’t set out to make a double album. Did the songs just come so easily that you found that you ended up with so many songs?
We didn’t set out to do it like this. We did this initial recording session in this pub in Ireland. Absolutely. We were touring in Ireland. We had several days off, and we decided to go to this little pub in West Cork, and we just kind of took it over and set up for a few days and recorded a bunch of stuff. Then we invited a small audience in and recorded. So, most of what you hear on the record is recorded live in front of 30 people that were in this tiny little room. It felt really edgy for us. We never had shared the songs with anyone before. So, they were going to tape, and they were also getting performed for the first time for an audience. Then we went back to the States, and we often have recorded this beautiful old church in Woodstock, New York called Dreamland.
We decided to go back to this studio and finished the record, did some overdubs, recut, a couple of things that hadn’t worked out in Ireland. While we were there, we just had this whole other sort of chapter of songs. So, I guess things had evolved in our lives or something. So, a bunch of those went on the record as well. It felt like this is our ethos as a band. It’s fun to just let it spill over the edges a bit. We’re not a band who’s trying to make a concise pop statement. So, it felt good to let it sort of just contain the breadth of what it wanted to contain.
Well, the sound is fantastic considering it started off being recorded in a pub. That’s amazing. How much extra work did you have to do to it when you got it back to the States?
Well, Josh produces all of our records, and that’s sort of his wheelhouse. He’s producing records for other people all the time. We often have worked with this engineer, Bella Blasco, and she came to Ireland and brought a remote setup. Honestly, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how there’s not bleed of everything and every other thing – and there kind of is. We had as a drum baffle a comforter that came off of a bed from one of the rooms upstairs in the pub and it was draped over a chair to create a baffle between the drums and the rest of the mics. But it was a very DIY setup. So, I think that Bella and Josh worked some wizardry and also DJ James Goodwin, who has mixed our records and mastered them, that I’m sure he had something to do with it as well.
Somebody has said – it could have been Josh – that the album is an ode to the blessed mess of our humanity. It covers a lot of bases there. We can’t talk about every song, but you mentioned how a lot of them were very personal.
Yes. There’s almost like there’s safety in numbers in some way. It’s funny, when you were talking about your daughter and just when I was younger, I can remember getting in the car with my kids and their dad, and my dad and my mom and my dad was play something from the new Bonny Light album, and I put on the record and ‘When I Was Younger’ came on. My dad said at the end of it, ‘So, who wrote that one?’ And I said, ‘Well, they’re all co-writes and they’re based on trad.’ It felt like there was safety in numbers. There’s a way in which I think all of us maybe have felt pretty safe to share stuff that if it was an Anais Mitchell record, I might not put that on the record. Like I was saying about the age, there’s so much music out there about the kind of ups and downs of the young heart in love, out of Love, and there is some of that on this record. But there’s also being a parent, there’s also reckoning with mortality, reckoning with aging, all that stuff exists on these two albums.
TOUR DATES REMAINING
MAR 7, 2025
Port Fairy Folk Festival
Port Fairy, Australia
MAR 8, 2025
Golden Plains
Meredith, Australia
MAR 9, 2025
Panama Festival
Golconda, Australia
MAR 10, 2025
WOMADelaide
Adelaide, Australia
MAR 11, 2025
City Recital Hall
Sydney, Australia
John Grant