Anais Mitchell

Last year I listened to Anais Mitchell’s “Hadestown” on nearly endless repeat for weeks. The depth of artistic vision and execution were amazing – “Hadestown” was one of my Top 5 records from last year. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Anais perform a few times in the last few months and I’m thrilled that she’ll be coming to Billsville – hope you can join us.

“Anaïs sings of love among the ruins, coming of age to find
yourself an outsider looking for the place you belong, finding other
strangers along the way. Details … are offered like clues or keys to
the reality all of us sense is imminent and eternal beneath the
surfaces of things.”
— Hugh Blumenfeld, Sing Out!

From her current home base in a 200-year-old farmhouse in rural Vermont, Anaïs (“uh-NAY-iss”) Mitchell writes songs that are as intimate as conversations and as rich in detail as short stories. The daughter of “hippie back-to-the-landers” whose father was a novelist and English professor, she remembers her family’s home (another farmhouse in the same state) containing “a library full of novels, and lots of old folk and psychedelic rock albums. The books and the records all lived in the same room, which I am sure led to me thinking of songwriting as a kind of literature, a noble poetic enterprise.”

No surprise, then, that the reference points of her music may seem to come from all over the map while still interconnected: the country ballads of the Carter Family, the hard-edged cabaret of Brecht and Weill, the story-songs of Randy Newman, the vast narrative scope of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and the intricately crafted tales of her namesake, bohemian feminist Anaïs Nin, to name a few.

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