Anaïs Mitchell’s broad smile as she marches purposefully on stage straight into the arms of a packed audience who follow every step with palpable adoration is well merited. It’s been a triumphant journey since her debut album a decade ago, her rich imagination fuelling a songwriting flair that’s taken her from a liberal childhood on a Vermont farm to the patronage of her most obvious influence Ani Di Franco and the extraordinary folk opera Hadestown, her rampantly imaginative re-telling of the Orpheus-Eurydice story in depression-era America.
Now in development as a theatrical production, Hadestown still plays a key role – in a moment of startling self-belief, she even abandons the stage mic to deliver the album’s most rousing track Way Down Hadestown as a first encore.
Yet she has much armoury to carry a superb show without it, and tonight’s set is peppered with gems from her brilliant 2012 album, Young Man in America, including the epic title track, its loaded narrative threaded into a subtle melodic structure that holds you rapt.
In truth she had us at hello. Boldly opening with the challenging traditional song Willie O’Winsbury is evidence that with enough conviction audiences will follow and, given the accolades heaped on last year’s wondrous Child Ballads album, why wouldn’t they?
As she later proves with another huge ballad, the mystical, murderous Clyde Water, she’s an entrancing storyteller as well as a charismatic performer. She reveals a well-schooled sense of humour, too, flirting with full-blown R&B on the steamy Any Way You Come, with a running joke about how she wants it recorded by Bonnie Raitt (“to put our daughter through university”). There’s even environmental politics, plaintively addressing the US’s Keystone pipeline plan on Any Way the Wind Blows.
With songs like this, one singer with one guitar is still a potent force.
