Anaïs Mitchell

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Speaker 1: Pushkin. Today we're hearing from singer, songwriter and playwright Annaeus Mitchell. Annaus Mitchell spent the past sixteen years building the world of Hadestown, a career defining stage musical. Hadestown is a Depression era retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus, euridice, Hades, and Persephone. It has grown from a low budget community production in her native Vermont to a concept album to a Broadway phenomenon in the winner of eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Original Score. But in March twenty twenty, when the COVID nineteen pandemic shuttered theaters, Annaeus, like so many others, moved back home to Vermont. She was nine months pregnant with her second child. The move and change of pace inspired her to start writing in d folk songs. Her self titled album, released at the beginning of twenty twenty two, is made up of those songs. It's produced by Josh Kaufman and was made with collaborators like Boni Vair, The National, and her own band, Bonnie Light Horseman. The project is a Nais's first collection of all new material under her own name in ten years. On today's episode, Bruce Hedlum speaks with a Naias Mitchell about her new album. Her experience is growing up in a small town and how Hades Town came to be. She also played some songs off her new album live for us. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Mitchell. Before we get into the conversation, here's a Nus Mitchell's live performance of her song bright Star off her new album Bright Star. When I first laid eyes upon you, I was filled with such a longing to be with you in the dark, bright Star. Since I could not fly beside you, I would shine my own course by you, and I sailed by your light. Break Star. I have sailed in all directions. I have followed your reflection to the farthest foreign short bread Star, Bright Star. I have anchored in the harbor. I have brought my gifts to barter board drifters, bedding board, bread Star. I have drunk the wine of age in the company of strangers. We have sung in tongues of angels, and then stumbled on the pavement. And I understood my place and my purpose in relation to the young and ancient knights. Bright Star, I am home now from my roaming. I'm a lowe ni in the blooming with a ship's sod in the yard, Bright Star, there's a thought upon me, dawning. You've launched a thousand longings, and I don't know who you are, right Star. You have never been my vessel or the wind my sails are wrestling, or lands to a check travel or the friends with you my revel. There are lengths to it you'll never know. I went to be your lover and you love it and your sight, Bright Star. When I first laid eyes upon you, I was filled with such a longing to be with you in the dark, Bright Star. If I could have flown beside you, I would not have had the sight of you to guide me through the world. So why and bright So your self titled album? Why are self titled albums always late in people's careers? Now? I don't know. Tell me about making this album, right, It's funny to make a self titled record at this stage, but for me, if really appropriate, Like, I started out as a singer songwriter, and I you know, made a bunch of records when I was sort of in my twenties, and then I started working on this musical Hades Town in my mid twenties, and it just sort of took over my creative world. And so it had been a long time since I had actually been able to sit down with my guitar and write kind of what wanted to pass through my heart, regardless of you know, plot and character development and all that stuff. And so it felt like a return in a way. And also, the songs on this record are all actually my own. I'm the speaker in all the songs is me, and the stories are my stories, which I kind of had never let myself do, Like I always wanted to take on the voices of other characters and kind of tell other stories. It's a confessional, you know, confessional record, and so it felt right to put my name on it. You know, that's funny because I would have assumed that your early things were confessional too, And maybe that's just the unfair cliche about women songwriters that they're always just, you know, men are creating characters, women are just pouring out their hearts. Well, but your early songs were like that, that you were taking on character. I mean, there was a few heart poorer songs, but from early on I really was kind of interested in dressing that stuff up in different ways. But you know, my very first record was like quite political. Actually, it was influenced by like protest music and early early Bob Dylan and stuff like that. And I made a record later called young Man in America, which was, yeah, really taking out a lot of the voices of other characters, and a lot of me was in there. A lot of my feelings were in there, but I didn't have to stand there and sing it as if it was my own story. And I think I was maybe a little nervous to do a confessional sounding thing. I was afraid to be navel gazy in a way that I may be perceived in the nineteen nineties, like Coffeehouse World. I wanted to do something different than that. What is it like now to get up on stage and confess your inner thoughts to an audience? Well, everything is different now, you know. I think so many of us are just trying to figure out who we are and what is this what we do post pandemic and also for me post Haiti's sound, because that became my identity for so long, and so to actually get up and play my own songs and it feels familiar and also totally different. But I love what can happen with just kind of vulnerability of connecting with an audience. So there's something about opening your mouth really wide to sing that feels vulnerable in its own right, but then to also be trying to just kind of be as hard on sleeve as possible. That felt like the project for this batch of songs. Are there times you have trouble doing that on stage? There's times when it doesn't feel real, Like if it doesn't feel authentic, then it especially feels like a problem because the songs are so from the heart, do you know to mean? Like, if I'm playing a Haities sound song and I'm not one hundred percent feeling it, it's okay. But if it's you know, a heart poem and I'm sort of out to lunch, that doesn't feel right. But I wouldn't say that it's scary in terms of like to share the feelings. I love to do that. When I sat down to listen to the record, the first song is Brooklyn Bridge, and I think, oh, this is going to be because you were out of New York for the pandemic, I thought, Oh, this is just going to be a New York record I'm missing it. I'm missing it. It's not but the first song is this very romantic song about being in New York. Did you miss it? Yeah? I totally missed it, so right. The backstory is I was right about to have our second baby in March of twenty twenty and made a really like eleventh hour decision to pack a car and drive to Vermont, which is where I was born and raise and that sort of time of stillness. Up there, I wrote a bunch of songs, and Brooklyn Bridge is actually when that I had I had tried to write when I was living in New York. I had the idea, and I almost like I wouldn't let myself write it. It felt like overly romantic, and even like the word Brooklyn I didn't want to use. And then finally when I left the city, I just kind of let myself feel the feelings of romance that I always have felt about this town. I was commuting to Manhattan a lot from Brooklyn when I was working on Haiti Stone, and there are some really special rides that I had with Rachel Chapkin, the director of the show. Sometimes, like after a really long day and a long night of like tech and rehearsal, and then a meeting at the bar about the show, and then we'd be in a cabin riding over the bridge back to Brooklyn and kind of all of our hopes and dreams for the show, and some of that is in that song. So tell me now about Bright Star. So I had landed in Vermont, had the baby one week after we got there, and then literally I could see the star again. I moved back to this family land, which is a sheep farm that my parents bought and like the seventies, and my parents have a house there. My brother's family as a house, and when my grandparents were alive, they had a little house on this same land, and that's where we moved to. And the stars are just thick up there, and so I was seeing that, and also I think, you know, we were all in that just strange time of stillness after so much activity, and it was really the first time I'd stayed in one place for as long as I could remember, the gaining of like a little bit of perspective on all of that restless pursuit of whatever it is, you know, whatever it is you're chasing, and kind of a feeling of making peace with it. That to me is what that song's about. Was it strange living with your parents again, or living around your parents and your family? It was amazing, really, Yeah, it was amazing, especially having a little newborn to just be in the family kind of fold. And because everyone was locked down and quarantined at that time, and we had a whole farm full of people. You know, one person could go shopping for us all and we'd have like dinners together, and you know, I mean the other side of the stories that we've ended up staying in Vermont, like we haven't moved back to New York. And then you know, it became Okay, I'm going to be in proximity with my parents, my brother, my old friends, my like ninth grade English teachers. I'm going to run into on the street because in this small town where I grew up, and that had you know, all kinds of feelings that came with that, Like I was a little scared to confront that stuff. But it's been pretty special and like healing in a way to like re establish myself in that community, Like I'll here I am now at this point in my life. Well, because you've got great songs about growing up there, but almost from this from this adult perspective, back Roads and a Little Big Girl. Yeah, there there's a lot on this record that was inspired by returning to my home place and having a lot of memories about growing up there and also seeing it with the new eyes. I think that is the thing, especially like it's a super small town, but I didn't know that growing up. You know, how big is it? Um, that's a question I never know my answer, Like populations, demographics, I don't know. But but the town I went to high school in essentially there's one main street, there's a there's a pizza shop, there's like a coffee shop, there's a bar, and that's pretty much it. What was growing up there? Like what was it like in your home? Is there a lot of music in your house? So my parents are not musicians, but my dad can carry a tune. My mom can't. And my dad was and is a writer. He wrote novels when he was young, and then more kind of nonfiction stuff when he was older, and he became an English professor at Middlebury College, which is right near where I would grew up. And he also loves music and had a great record collection, and it lived kind of in the library with the books, and he loves lyrics. He would sing along to stuff and he would know every word. And this is kind of a special thing for me to witness as a kid. So certainly, like I grew up in a house with a love of words, and I wanted to be a writer of some kind. And then it turned out like my way was to write songs. What was his record collection folk revival stuff, so it was Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and then some kind of psychedelic rock like the Grateful Dead records and what are they called Love It Underground. Yeah, you don't want to forget that. Yeah, no, No, in New York they're not going to let you back in more. Sure you're gonna have to leave. Yeah. I mean it's all if you think about it's all very lyrically interesting stuff that he was into. My parents were like hippies. They grew up in the suburbs and they bought this farm as part of the kind of back to the land movement, and that that's where they went, was to Vermont, And I was raised with my older brother there on this farm, and no television. My mom was anti television, so there was a lot of just wild running half naked in the woods and making up games and stuff like that. They were pro sheep anti tell yeah you got it. When did the guitar start? Yeah? My first instrument was a violin that I studied from age seven. I loved it, and also I hated it and I didn't want to practice it and things like that. When I finally let go of that, I picked up the guitar and I took like a few lessons, very casually from a guy who would essentially just teach me to play the songs I wanted to learn, which was a great motivator for actually learning how to play the guitar. And I guess I was maybe fifteen or sixteen. What were those songs? Annie de Franco was a big one. Yeah, Mary Shaping Carpenter. I mean, I was into a lot of female songwriters that were kind of blossoming in that era. Dar Williams was one. Tory Amos, although that's sort of piano bassed, so I didn't really learn those. But yeah, you have a very particular guitar playing style you Travis pick, but it's not the kind of usual. Yeah, and Travis Pick, where did you? How did you get that? I don't use a pick? I really only put with my fingers, and yeah, it's bizarre. The guy that I learned from justin Purdue is his name was like a jazzer and he played with his fingers and he was double jointed in his hands and he could play these beautiful, you know, fingerstyle stuff. And I later, Yeah, I learned kind of certain finger picking patterns when I was kind of my early twenties, like just getting going, and then I feel like you just kind of you learn a few and then you just are off to the races with them. And that's that's kind of been where I came from. I did. I was We were saying before the interview that I recently started playing an open tuning, which I never did before. And that's it's so amazing because you honestly, like could play with just one hand, smoke a cigarette with the other hand. She sometimes do you take your the person I know it takes her hand off the fretboard sometimes. Yeah, yeah, it's liberating. Yeah, you see that with pianist they'll lift one hand off. I've never seen somebody just let the guitar go for uh huh did go into open tuning? Did that change the way you wrote? So I started to play open tuning in the context of this folk rock band, a man called Bonny Light Horseman, which was really like when I was in the kind of most intense part of rewriting Haiti Sound, because I worked on that show for on and off for thirteen years, and then as we were sort of it became clear that we were heading for Broadway, it became, you know, it was my sole focus and no regrets coyote, Like, I loved working on it, but I also was like completely overwhelmed by the stress of it. And I found that Bonny Light Horseman was kind of like the one other creative thing I could do at the same time as working on this show, and it ended up being the kind of antidote or like medicine for me that I needed, which was early on. Our first record is all kind of re workings of traditional texts, and so there was something really nice about like being able to draw from that well and like rest in that music rather than the act of writing. Town is very text focused and having to come up with a lot of stuff, and so there was that. And then also just from the get go, we played open D tuning and it's just so wide open. It feels so epic and like expansive and spacious, like you just want to let the chord ring out, put your hand in the air. So that became the kind of the antidote to Haities sound for me. And then I remember like at times I'd finished playing with Bonnie Light and I'd have to tune back up to standard tuning, and I'd feel like I was putting on a corset to go back to standard. Standard is also great. At this point, I'm ready to go back, but it's yeah, it's been a revelation to play open You know, you use a lot of color tones in your melodies, use a lot of ninths, You're not just sticking to chord tones, and I was kind of wondering whether the open tuning sort of facilitated that. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, it's that kind of I associate it with like British Isles folk music and the kind of ornamentation that you hear with like Irish singers, the way that they're grace notes and the way they bend things, And I just find it really infinitely fascinating how you can just have one drone chord almost and then the just infinite number of notes you could sing over it and they'd be compelling in different ways. It's sort of like very simple and also sophisticated. I feel that about Irish music. We'll be right back with more from Bruce Headlam and a Nias Mitchell. After a quick break, we're back with more of Bruce's conversation with a Naias Mitchell. So you mentioned Hadestown and we do have to talk about it great. You're like, yeah, I only worked on for fourteen years. Where did the idea come from? It kind of came out of nowhere, but it was right. I was driving in my car kind of early on in my career as a as a singer songwriter, driving like a super long distance between two gigs for like tips, and I got this just melody kind of dropped into my lap, which was the chorus of that song wait for Me from the show, and there was lyrics that came with it. It went way for me, I'm come in in my garters and pearls with what melody? Did you borrow me? From The Wicked Underworld? And that was the lyrics that came with it, that just came to you in a car. It came in the car. Yeah, Now, did you pull over and write it down or you don't know what I would have done. That might have been pre iPhone. I don't think I could have recorded it on my phone. But there was something about it that the la which obviously none of those lines ended up in the show except for the first one, but the underworld and the kind of it felt like there to see an ortheis story, and I thought, I think I was hungry to work on a long form thing, just like to see what could happen. I've always been into storytelling as a songwriter. I love like the ballads the British Isles, like really long ballads, and I like the Texas like Raconteur, you know Texas songwriter things very like short story within a song, and just the idea of writing a bunch of songs that had to lean on each other and that you had to hear them all in order to get the full story. I also was like I was right out of college, and I think, you know, I was a kind of young and idealistic and naive and creative coming into a world where, you know, just coming up against the way the world is, you know, politically at that time, and also and now you have to pay the rent and things like that. And there was something about that coming of age or that story that felt inherent to the Orpheus myth. You know, he's this optimistic character who believes he can do an impossible thing and then he comes up against you know, the way the world is. And so there is a way in which like that story was a catch off for like a lot of things that I was going through at that time. Did you see a film like did you see Black Orpheus or something? What made you think of the Orpheus? Yeah? I always had known that myth. I remember I read it in a children's illustrated book of mythology, the Dolarus book. My son has them all, Yes, I got them from my kids too. Yeah, there's an illustration. And the story is just so beautiful and strange that it doesn't have a happy ending you expect it. It's all set up for a Hollywood ending. You don't get it. And the hero is a musician, an artist. And then I did because I was curious. Yes I did. I watched Black Orpheus, and there's a Cocteau film laur Fee. There's the Tennessee Williams play there. There's a French version that I think was translated. Maybe Richard Burton was in it. Oh cool. Yeah, a lot of people have been inspired by it. You know, Oh, Sarah Rule. There's an amazing play by Sarah Rule called Eurice. I think it's a myth that's just contained so much raw like potential energy in it that it kept the wind in our sails, you know, mine and everyone else who worked on it for so long, and it always felt like as much effort as we all were putting in elbow grease like creatively, it also was as if we were unearthing a thing that already existed. Like I thought a lot of times about that idea of the sculpture in the stone. You know that the sculpture is already there, Yeah, and he just chipping away at it, and then it occasionally you'd be like, oh that you know this, that orchestration choice, that choreography thing, that costume piece, like this set piece that like, that's the sculpture in the stone, Like you sort of would feel it. I think we all would probably feel the same way about it that it revealed itself to us. Now. At that point, you were a young songwriter, and I imagine had you said to your record label or anybody else, yeah, I want to do a musical about orpheus, A lot of people would say, just put out another album, just tour. Was it hard to say to people, this is what I want to their credit? I was. I was working with Righteous Bade Records at the time, Annie to Franco's record label, who put out my kind of second singer songwriter record, and then I started working on this piece. And before we made that record, he began in Vermont where I was living, as is like diy community theater project. My friend Michael Chorney, who's like the original orchestra of the piece and who continued all the way to Broadway, was arranging the songs for his like little band that he had at the time, and there was an early director, Ben Machtick, and we put up this kind of ragtag version of the thing. It was, you know, not there's half as many songs or maybe a quarter as compared to it's on stage now, but there was something about it that felt really viby, and I remember the label sent a couple of people and they saw it and they said like, yes, we'd love to support this, and Annie said she would sing the role of prosephone before anyone else was on board, so it was really they were actually very supportive. And then it became this record with these other sort of more famous guest singers, and those guys are an important part of the story because I don't know that it would have caught the ear of as many folks as it did if they hadn't been involved. And then I did a lot of touring around with it as just a concert piece, and finally moved to New York City, decided I wanted to develop it further, met the producers and Rachel and that was almost like the halfway mark, and then six or seven more years of development. Did your enthusiasm ever flag for it's such a long process? Oh yeah, yeah? Would you ever think? Am I crazy? That? Yeah? And I thought, would I ever make another record of my own songs? Whatever? I'd say, Like, the toughest thing was the amount of kind of banging my head against a wall in a small writing space in Kawana, so I was living trying to rewrite the stuff again and again. But when I was in the room with my collaborators and you know, with the actors who are able to just pull rabbits out of hats all the time and you know, make you see the work in a different way, that always was like really inspiring. And there is that thing of a musical is a really collaborative form, and you've got to show up for people, you know, show up for the people you're working with, and vice versa. And I was inspired by the folks I was working with. I wanted to show up for them. What's terrifying, though, is if this thing bombs and I don't want to give away the ending, but it doesn't bomb, people are out of work. And did you feel that kind of weight? No, I don't think so. I just was fixated on I wanted it to be as good as it could be when it got to Broadway, And the fact we got off Broadway was a miracle in its own right, you know. And then to have landed on Broadway at all was a miracle because you toured with it after off Broadway, right, you went to Edmonton. Yeah, we did development, Yeah in Edmonton, and then we went to London to the National Theater there. Yeah, at this point where you saying, God, how long does it take to development of musical Yeah, for me, I needed all that time. I mean I think we needed it because I am not trained in this world, in this form, and so there was just a big learning curve. Like I you know, I know how to write a song writer song that's three and a half minutes long and it's got three verses in a chorus, maybe a bridge, and that's part of writing for the stage. But there's you know, this whole other element of drama and how to make a satisfying drama and songs needing to have results at the end of them, or you know, revelations. It's got to move the plot along exactly, yeah, or it's got to build character. Do you remember there were things that your director here's told you that. Did she say you got to go home and write a song about X because that's missing from this show. Yeah, for sure. Well. Rachel is a very inspiring and kind of hardcore person. She's kind of tough love, which I needed, you know. When I first started working with her, I remember, like the very first table read that we did, she kind of followed up afterwards this like laundry list of things that she thought could be improved, and I was like, you gotta understand, I've been working on this already for you know, seven years, six years. And she was like, well, if we're going to work together, you'll have to find a way to move past your fatigue. And I was like, wow, you know, ladies serious and I needed that. And it wasn't just her. We worked with an amazing drama turg named Ken Chernelia, and also our producers, especially Mara Isaacs, were very involved, kind of dramaturgically, like you know, meeting on a regular basis about stuff. I loved it in a way. It's nice to have people to show up for and it's nice to have a kind of accountability. And my work for like the development of the Broadway show coincided with me having my first kid, and there was something about the discipline of like, all right, there's gonna be a reading in this many weeks and so I had to carve out this time that felt like very grounding for me becoming a new mom and you know, your whole schedule is upended. I wasn't able to go about things the way I would in my songwriter world, where I'm like, well, when when inspiration strikes, all work on this. I mean, we can give away the ending. It won the Tony for Best Musical, you won for Best Original Score. You also wrote the book, though you didn't. I'm sure people along the way said, well, you're a musician, but you can't write a book for a Broadway musical. Did you always say Nope, I'm doing it. You know, it's a funny thing. I always have been very moved by musicals that are like sung through right. Lay Miss is one of my favorites, probably my favorite of all time. And I love Hamilton, I love Sweeney Todd. You know, I love a lot of these shows where there's not that moment of like the book scene that then becomes a song. There's that awkward transition, yeah, and just the suspension of reality. It's closer to opera that has entag exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so you know, early on there was talk of like, should we bring in a book writer for this? And I felt nervous about what that would do to the piece, which really had its roots in the music world, and wanted to kind of remain sort of straddling the like world of concert in the world of drama. Eventually, they, you know, people stopped suggesting that after a few stars from you. Yeah. Yeah. It took a lot of kind of learning to figure out, like how to write that sort of recitative stuff. And the first thing we did was we created Hermes who was able to just speak to the audience and literally tell them what's going on, you know, a narrator figure. And then and so it felt easier to kind of write in that way. And then eventually I was like, Rachel, I think I need to just I need Orpheus and Eurialesy to speak to each other. And she said, yeah, I think you should do that. And I was like, but it's to rhyme and it's got to be you know, metered, and she's like, okay, and so that's you know, that's what Restit TV is. And it's yeah, it's very hard to write. I'll bet now, had you read a lot of poetry, is there's something that sort of guided you with that or that you just sit down and figure it out. Yeah, I just sat down and figured it out. I mean, I guess inspired by the musicals that use that. I mean, lemis is a great example. That's so incredible the way that those motifs kind of come back around in the stuff. And yeah, I mean, I think the tricky thing about it is that it's like it's both a totally rarefied conversation going on, and also it has to kind of sound natural, you know, because it is, after all, like a scene between two people. Yeah. The other thing you do in this musical is you create a world, which which I often think, you know, when you see Broadway shows, you said, well, they're trying to convince me of this world. I'm not quite buying it. Would you create this whole underground that the America of long ago? But not really I'm not even sure where it is chronologically. It's affected by climate change, but it feels like twenties depression. Yeah, how did you conceive of that? How did you make that work? You're right, it's meant to not be set in a particular time or place. It's really, you know, this mythic space. But it takes a lot of inspiration from the depression era because of the themes I think there was in that era, like the dust bowl, right, and the kind of the dust storms that were created by this like industrial agricultural overreach, really like a man made natural disaster, just like what we see now with climate change, but on a smaller scale and sort of a more poetic and vintage scale. And also a lot of the music that I was inspired by, the kind of like protest stuff, the IWW like organizing labor, organizing songs, what do you gathrie? Stuff like that that I always found very inspiring. And those themes were very present in that era in terms of the sort of exploitation of labor and then the unionization of labor, and those are also themes that show up in our show. And yeah, you know, it was funny that I remember a really important moment in the writing for Off Broadway where I figured out that Hermes could just say don't ask where brother, don't ask when it was a road to hell, it was hard time, so it was a world of gods and men that he could actually tell the audience not to worry about what year it was or what the precise geographical location was. And then as an audience member, you're like, Okay, I'm not going to worry about that, you know. Do you remember coming up with that line? Yeah, I don't know, I just remember the kind of light bulb moment was seeing it come out of the mouth of the character at the top of the show, and the character who was playing hermis at that time, Chris Sullivan. And actually, you know, the roometurg I was mentioning Ken Chernilia. He sort of came from a different world than us. He was working for Disney at the time, and he was very into this, like just take care of the audience at the top of the show, you know, just establish like where we are so they're not spending the whole first act trying to figure it out. Something about letting people know they didn't have to worry about that. That felt like it did. It did an important thing. It makes them open to write the experience and then a lot of the orchestration, it feels very like New Orleans, Yeah, influence. Yeah, that's great. The dust Bowl thing makes me think you could have done sort of very sparse Western country, but it's got a different kind of feeling to it. And at Hadestown feels a little bit like it's got a little bit of French quarter to it. Definitely. Yeah. And Our Path, Our Path I think was quite different from other musicals in that, Like I mentioned Michael Cherney, who was arranging the songs way back at the beginning, you know, in this DIY version of the show. And when we made our studio record, Todd Sickafus produced this album. He's the basis for Rannie to Franco, so it was all kind of in the family and he produced it and then and began to also add arrangements at that time and then became a co arranger with Michael, and the orchestrations have all they basically have been baked into the story, you know, since the beginning, where I think a lot of shows the theaters like obsessed with text and they just you know, they're not music's like is that happen? Is music happening? Okay? Great? They're so focused on what's happening in the text, and this show like necessarily it couldn't be that way because it was just sort of turned upside down, like it had come from this really musical place. And those guys are both you know, jazz influenced and Michael and Todd and also kind of art rock, indie rock influenced. And there was also something about the New Orleans sound that felt right like New Orleans feels like a mythic city, right, and it being kind of right on the front lines of a lot of this stuff, the kind of poverty and the climate stuff, it felt like the right place. You started writing this before the financial meltdown? Yeah, did that influence you at all? And they're kind of the sudden people out of their homes and the sudden upheaval in the country. You know, it's been so wild with this show because at different moments what was happening in current events seemed to be speaking directly, you know, through the songs in a way that they the songs hadn't been intended that way. But I remember that song, wedding song, you know, times being what they are hard and getting harder all the time. I used to play that in my songwriter shows, and I would introduce the song by saying like, this is from this folk opera I'm working on. It's set in a post apocalyptic American depression era. And people started to laugh, like really hard when I would say that, and I was like, what's going on, you know, And it was that they were feeling the connection between the yeah, the financial breakdown and that song. And then later obviously that song while we Build the Wall, which was written also in like two thousand and six, started to resonate really hard with the stuff that our former president was staying in his campaign, right, And the lyric is, yeah, why do we build the wall? My children? My children? You know, we build the wall to keep us free. The enemy is poverty, and we build the wall, and the wall keeps out the enemy, and we build the wall to keep us free. And that's another one that I played in my songwriter shows for years, and I never expected it to feel new again, and then it did. Okay, Now, I'm sure a million people have asked you, but I have to ask you anyway. You've been working on this for thirteen years, and it must have seemed like a pipe dream at many points. You see it on stage, which I'm sure you get raptures. Review. First of all, what was that like? You see it in old movies like Betty Davis waiting to see what the morning paper says about a performance? What is it like to actually sit around and wait for a review from the newspaper? Right? Oh, It's so funny in the theater because the reviews come out like right after the show, and everyone's at a party, do you know what I mean? You're like having some champagne at like a party, and then someone will like pull out their phone in the women's room and there's the New York Times review. Yeah. I was a deer in the headlights. I mean, when I think about it, I was so kind of exhausted from the effort of the rewriting, and I remember just like, yeah, I think it was opening night. I got to go up, you know, with Rachel after the with the cast and sort of take a bow, and someone handed me a big bouquet of flowers. You didn't know. I didn't know what to do with it, so I just put it on the ground. You really are new to the theater. It was very awkward for me, and but but mostly just because I was completely overwhelmed by the experience. I didn't have a way to process it in the moment or feel proud or relieved or any of those things. You know. It was actually pretty powerful too. After the long shutdown. It was shut down for a year and a half and then we reopened. We had a reopening night where I'm like well rested, well hydrated and got to really enjoy that, you know, experience of seeing the show again and also seeing the like coming back to life of the theater and of New York City and the culture, you know, in general, that felt really powerful. But the main thing I think I'll say about that time was like, yeah, I remember one time, I was staying in Manhattan, so I was working on the show as much as I could have. Didn't want to commute back and forth to my apartment in Brooklyn. I couldn't sleeper. I was up early, and I went for a jog around Midtown in the dark, and I jogged past the theater and there was like these kids were camped out outside the theater waiting to get tickets. I don't rush tickets or what. I'm not sure what the situation was, but and some of them were dressed up cuss playing, you know, our characters. And that was a moment where I was like, I have no idea what this show is, like, I don't know what it means too. I'm never going to know what the relationship is of these kids to this show. It's not mine, you know, it's its own animal, and it's like living in the world now doing its thing. Powerful and strange feeling. And then on Tony Night. Now, you didn't win a lot of Off Broadway awards that played an off Broadway. So did you go into the Tony saying I got nominated, that's fine, or did you think, oh, maybe I don't remember. I remember. I did have to sort of prepare some remarks just in case. Yeah, I mean, let's the awkward thing about the awards thing, since you have to you have to get like all nervous and prepared, even if then nothing happens. Yeah, it was an extraordinary night. I was so amazing to see so many people on our team win Tony's Andre you know, Andrea Shields gave that incredible speech and Rachel and Yeah, it was an amazing night. You want to eight overall? Yeah, Best Musical. David Byrne gave me my Tony. It was very special. And then I walked with him to the press room like you didn't put it on the ground like the flower. Yeah, right now, is there going to be a movie? I would love that. I'm not in a rush for that to happen, but I'd love that to happen. Yeah. Yeah, you would have to be animated, wouldn't it. Oh, it's so interesting that you say that because I've thought that a bunch of times. It's tricky to know, Yeah, I'm really in a space of like there was a lot of kind of talk of it right after Broadway, and it felt to me like, hey, I gotta take a break from this thing. I can't even look at it anymore and be like I really want I really wanted a film adaptation to be its own animal and not feel like it was imitating what what was happening on stage. And it's tricky because it's not, as you're saying, not setting a particular time or place through it's easy for it to be done kind of wrong if it's live action. I guess we'll be right back with more from Bruce Headlam and Annias Mitchell. After a quick break, let's hear a live performance of Annas Mitchell's song Revenant off her latest album where'd y'all Letters All Again? Coffee rings in a book, point pen, tear stains every known Then I remember what they meant. Revenant, come on back again, Come on, Revenant, come and take my hand, Revenant, come on back in her box under the stairs, found the lock of a child's hair. Suddenly I saw you there rainny eyed in a wooden chair, ran outside. I hede your face in the wild. Queen Anne's lace, green and white around your place, wave and the win. Revenance, come on back again, Come on, Revenance, Come and take my hand. Revenance, Come and let me hold you in my arms. Come and give him my shoulder. Wedding. Come and show me what it is he wants. Oh familiar, Choose to draw as holds the mirror you've dressed before. Throw in shadows on the floor. I know you're behind that door. Light the lamp and turn the key. I'm standing out your vanity. We're as young as we liver be, oh as we ever been. Revenant, come on back again. Come on, Revenant, Come and take my hand. Evidence, Come on back again. Come on Revenant, come and take my hand. Evidence, Come on back. So if you sit down to do this album and then do those lessons from writing, characterization, moving it along, do they change your writing for this album? Yeah? I know, I know that I'm a different writer after Haiti sound, but I can't really put my finger on what that is. Partly I was I felt so free, I felt so free to write whatever passed through my heart and to be just me and the instrument and the words, and that felt really freeing. But yeah, I you know what, there's something that I did in that pandemic time that I never had done, never had allowed myself to do. All the people had mentioned it many times, which is this idea of just writing this song a day for like a week. And I did it with a group of other songwriters, and it was this beautiful and intense experience where if you if you fail to write a song on a given day, then you're like lovingly excommunicated in the group. Wow, you know, you don't finish the week. So that so again like a kind of a mutual accountability thing, and I found it so healing to have to say yes to whatever was wanted to come through and not second guess it. And a lot of the songs on this new record, actually that song Real World, I just wrote that in like an hour on one of those days, and a bunch of the other ones I sort of began in that time and then finished them on my own time. So that was a sort of I guess it was a kind of a discipline, but it also felt like just all bets are off and you're safe. To fail, you know, and that felt really good. But you couldn't not do it right. Oh yeah, yeah, maybe you need that kind of pressure a Broadway show angry songwriters like replacing the critics. Yeah, angry song Well, you know, I felt very free. I felt also like no one was watching and no one cared, which was important. I wrote the songs like more for me than anyone else, and then suddenly realized like, oh, I'm going to make a record out of these. And then I was like, I got to do this record immediately. I don't want to sit on them and think about them and try to improve them. So tell me about revenue. That's a song. I started in the song a day week and it was really inspired by my grandparents house that I was living in. There was a box full of my old journals and letter correspondences and I reread a bunch of them. I burned some of my old journals and some of them I kept, and there was a lack of hair and I had this just real, like visceral memory of being a kid in that house. You know, I grew up in my home, but I would run down the driveway to my grandparents house and it was kind of like my happy place. I could do crafting. My grandma was a quilter, and she always would have something on the stove. And I felt, yeah, in this way that you're kind of when you're a little kid, you're just become a party your surroundings, and you get you get upset about something in the house, and you sort of run outside into the garden and then you're just like one with the garden. That was the feeling that I think I was having in that house. And and that word revenant is so beautiful because I you know, it's sort of a phantom, but also I think it literally means like one who comes back, one who returns. And I'm not sure if that is me, you know, returning to that place of my childhood, or or my grandma. They thinking about my grandma, but it felt like I was encountering her. It's in some way and encountering myself, I think, is a thing at the age that I am that I am now looking in the mirror, you know, on her old bureau that I remember from being a kid. There's this old mirror and it's kind of you know when a mirror goes kind of dark, and see my face now, and I'm the age I am now here as young as you'll ever be. Tell me a bit about the song A Little Big Girl, which is a little political in points, but just tell me what inspired that. So that's a that took me years to write. I started that song in twenty sixteen, and I remember because I was on a tour with Patti Griffin and Sarah Watkins and the first verse of it kind of just drafted into my lap and I thought, Oh, this is gonna be easy, This is gonna be an easy one to write. And I tried and tried at various times, and I just couldn't figure out how to finish it. And I was also working on Haiti's sound, and it was hard to put, you know, the time in. But I think also I had to live some more years, you know, have another kid, be a little older, returned home. It's a song about growing older as a woman, and it's a little bit about my mom, about me and for my girls. And I think what made it hard to write actually is that there was times it was veering towards becoming sort of like a soapboxy thing, like me on a soapbox having it all figured out telling you what's wrong with the culture or whatever, And the truth is that like it's a song about not having it figured out, Like it's a song about arriving at this age thinking by now you'd have it figured out and you don't. And essentially like, yeah, the just the kind of like the tools that you gather as a young woman, the tools that work for you at a certain point no longer work for you, and the sense of like no one gave me the tools for now, or like how do I acquire this new set of tools? So is it a song? Is there a little bit of anger in the song that nobody gave you those tools? Yeah, but I wouldn't say it's anger directed anywhere but at myself. I mean, there's a really great line and it's set in a it's sexual context, but it has sort of this sort of wider meaning about let him have his way instead of saying what you want? Right. Yeah, I remember in the studio I was debating let them have their way versus let him have his way, you know, like let them have their way felt less pointed, I guess in terms of like gender stereotypes and whatever, And ultimately the other thing felt more true like it just felt more raw. But I think, yeah, you know, as a woman still like you learned to be sort of deferential and not to take up space, and so it's hard to learn how to do those things. You know, you wrote a massively successful Broadway musical, there must have been points in which you had to stand up for yourself. Yeah. I do stand up for myself, but I have a lot of feelings about it. You know, it takes a long time. Sometimes I have to like given to another person's idea and then realize I'm miserable, and then weeks later come back and say, actually I need to do this where Yeah, I wish there was less drama internally about that stuff. But it was actually really cool working with Rachel Chapkin, who's a total boss and yeah, very very assertive, and watching the way that she worked with people. I can remember like a time we were we were proofreading like the program for our show in London, and I wrote an email of something like, I don't know, what do you think about this? Maybe this could be a little bit more like this, you know, early deferential, and Rachel comes in. It's like what an is saying, is she wants this and you know it's powerful too. Yeah, she's good at that. So it's a little easier now to for you to say that, I guess. So, I guess it's a lifelong practice. Also, I do want to ask you a little bit about singing older songs. You did a whole really great album of child ballads, and child refers to the guy who collected the ballads, not actually children. You did your own version of Shenandoah. You did Hobo's lah blah by, which is the Yeah, wow, you did your research. Oh, it's all up here, and a lot of it seems to relate to Hadestown and that when you do those songs that almost kind of feels like the song's going through you. I don't know if that makes any sense, you know, that kind of experience of doing really old songs making it your own, but it's still it's like you're passing baton or some time. I guess what's the attraction for you to do those? Uh huh? It's so inspiring. I love traditional music, traditional text and mythology and old stories, and for me, like what I'm interested in always is the kind of like to be at the center of the ven diagram. Of like what feels true and real for me and emotional and sort of heart full and tearful and alive, and then what feels like it's epic, mythic, universal. The center of that is where I always kind of want to be because I guess it's like a way of locating myself in history. And also, yeah, the Bonny Light Horseman band, like our first record is all reworkings of traditional texts, and then we've just created a record that is original songs, but they're meant to be in conversation with the old stuff. And it really with that band especially felt like it's just a spectrum, you know, and that it's a relief almost to realize that you're not coming up with this stuff from scratch, Like we're all living in a world in which there's you know, there's eleven notes in the scale, and there's only so many stories. There's only so many words that you could tell those stories with, and so we're standing on the backs, you know, of the stuff that came before. And that's that's a I think a really inspiring and relieving feeling that you don't have to hold up the universe, you know, one of those ven diagrams. I love on your first album, you quote T. S. Eliott in the room, the women come and go speaking on their mobile phones. I'm not getting the crime exactly, but I love that. I love that sort of how you make that the stuff that feels more ancient and permanent. With this, it's just like contemporary reference. Thank you. I would like not write that line today. You wouldn't it would be sacrilege or I don't know. I just felt very literary. I've sort of maybe been running from academia since those days. I would have been like an undergrad when I wrote that. Pretty good for an undergrad, thank you. Okay, did your father approve he's the he's the professor in the family. Yeah, I'm sure. Okay, So this is a great record. What's next? So well, we just put out this new Bondy Light record. Okay, it's called Rolling Golden Holy. Just like last week, it came out and we've been touring with it. This year has been a crazy amount of travel because I've been touring this record as well as the Bonny Light record, and so I'm already like pretty psyched to go home and do some writing. I'm sort of desperate to do it. I feel like I've gotten some records out of my system which I really needed to do, and now you know, I would love if the right story came along to work on something longer for him to do. I have a dream to write a play that actually doesn't have music, and it's we'll see what happens. You have the story idea for it, or I do, but I shouldn't say it on the mic. You're not going to say it on the mic. That's great, thank you? Right, yeah, all right, well, thank you so much for coming in. It's been terrific night pleasure. Thank you so much. Album. You want to do one more? You want to do the short one? Um, yeah, let's do it, all right, let's do it. It's called the real world, all right. Yeah. I want to live in the real world. Weak out to real birds, singing loud enough to be really heard by us in the real world. I want to lie in the real grass, watch the real clouds rolling past the pastors, the ever lasting seals of the real world. I want to talk with my mouth full, pass around the vegetables with real folks at a real table a meal in the real world. I want to dance in your real grip, feel your real hands on my hips, and taste real whiskey on your lips when we kiss. In the real world, I want to cry on your shoulder, real feelings blowing over blow my nose like it really hold me close. In the real world. I want to live in the real world. We got the real birds singing loud enough to be really heard by us in the real world. Thanks to Mais Mitchell for coming through to talk about Haiti Sound. You can hear a new album and a playlist of other songs at broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast. We can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Ben Holliday, Eric Sandler, Jennifer Sanchez, our editor Sophie Crane. Our executive producer is Neia LaBelle. Broken Record is a production of push Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts, subscriptions, and if you like our show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app Our theme musics by Kenny beats On Justin Richmond