The first song on Anaïs Mitchell’s first solo album for a decade is Brooklyn Bridge, a snapshot over softly rising piano chords that sees her crossing the East River and leaving New York in a taxi, a loved one beside her. It could be a moment from a movie, or perhaps even a musical, which is the world that has kept Mitchell away from singer-songwriter work for a long time.
Way back in 2006 she was taking a budget version of her musical Hadestown, which transplants the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to Depression-era America, around Vermont in a converted school bus. In 2010 it became a concept album, with Ani DiFranco and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver singing roles alongside her. By 2016 what would become the best known version was opening as an Off-Broadway show, and by 2018 it was at our National Theatre. It had won eight Tony Awards on Broadway by 2019 and a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album by 2020.
So what we have here is a quietly lovely collection of folky, tranquil songs made by one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020. Aside from the identity of their composer they have almost nothing to do with the music of Broadway. The star here is Mitchell herself, telling a smaller, familiar pandemic story of leaving the city for a calmer, more contemplative life.
She moved back to Vermont to live in her grandparents’ old farmhouse with a newborn baby when Covid reached New York. Birds sing and church bells ring on The Words. Over the brushed drum rhythm of Revenant, she’s exploring old letters and powerful memories. On the emotional, steadily building Little Big Girl she worries about the passing of time and makes connections with younger versions of herself: “You catch your own reflection in a window in the dark/And for a moment it’s your mother coming home from work/Tell her you love her/Tell her you’re hurt.”
The sound and feel is similar to Taylor Swift’s retreat from a glitzier life on her pair of lockdown albums, Folklore and Evermore. Mitchell and Swift both sang on an album by Aaron Dessner’s band Big Red Machine last year. Dessner, and Swift’s frequent pianist Thomas Bartlett, appear here too.
Mitchell’s high, breathy voice has an intimacy that suits the homecoming theme. She’s travelled a long way from Hadestown, but sounds like she’s exactly where she should be.
