From a 200-year-old farmhouse in rural Vermont, Anaïs Mitchell writes songs that are as intimate as conversations and as rich in detail as short stories. With three full length critically acclaimed albums under her belt, including ‘Hadestown’ which received sensational reviews from all corners such as The Guardian, Times, Rolling Stone and NME , Mitchell has played hundreds of shows across the world, including performances and tours with Emmylou Harris, Bon Iver, Richard Thompson, Ani diFranco, the Low Anthem, Shawn Colvin and Josh Ritter among others. Mitchell is that rare musician who is equally comfortable wielding an acoustic guitar alone onstage, or scripting a vast operatic journey into the underworld.
In 2004, Mitchell made her debut record, ‘Hymns for the Exiled’, produced by long-standing collaborator Michael Chorney. A copy of the record found its way to Ani DiFranco, who offered to release her next album, The Brightness, and later a collaboration with Rachel Ries, ‘The Country EP’. The following few years saw Mitchell continuing to play shows around the world, while simultaneously working on ‘Hadestown’, her most ambitious project to date - an epic “folk opera” retelling of the Orpheus myth. The piece began as a live performance created in collaboration once more with Michael Chorney who arranged and orchestrated the songs, and fellow Vermont director Ben t. Matchstick. In their neck of the woods—TV-less by choice, far from big cities, in a land of radical politics and culture—making your own entertainment, and getting your friends and neighbors to help you flesh it out, is the only way to go. After fine-tuning the show, the trio gathered a cast of two dozen, commandeered a silver-spraypainted schoolbus, and hit the road (through several blizzards) for a couple of ragtag DIY tours of New England.
The next logical step? Hadestown, the album. Mitchell’s songs and Chorney’s orchestral arrangements were re-imagined by producer Todd Sickafoose and performed by a dream-team lineup including Ani DiFranco, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Greg Brown, and Mitchell herself, among others. The resulting album caught the attention of critics and music fans across the world, receiving five star reviews and raves from some of the most esteemed publications around.
