by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
For Anaïs Mitchell, there will always be a spark, whether she heeds it or not.
Creativity arrives as some mysterious idea or image that shows up from beyond the concrete world. Perhaps, it’s a vision of her father at her age. Perhaps, it’s pieces of the Greek Orpheus myth resumed thousands of years after its origins.
Whatever they are, they rap on the door and the singer/songwriter doesn’t quite know where they came from them, nor does she really need to. From there, as Mitchell puts it, she must decide “how much to show up” in their support to craft and mold them into song, to cut blocks of conceptual marble into lyrical sculptures.
Well, in recent years she showed up for her ideas in full force, over and over again. Enough to execute three consecutive albums, each with a binding through-concept: Hadestown (2010), Young Man In America (2012) and Child Ballads (2013). To say Anaïs Mitchell writes at the highest echelon of modern folk music isn’t just to note that she writes with an acoustic guitar in the 21st century.
Rather, as the author of Hadestown’s folk opera (on which she was supported by voices such as Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco) and Young Man In America’s mythic-feeling ode to men and women on the groundfloor of American life, she’s a practitioner of conceptual projects that require massive and diverse undertakings.
“I definitely have always been interested in songs that tell stories, and that’s why I was attracted to folk music beyond the aesthetics,” Mitchell says.
Addressing the age-old problem of newness in folk music, she said she views reimagining as her creation task, her only possible one. Mitchell points to “April The 14th (Part 1)” by Gillian Welch as the sort of song that — with its classical Americana imagery and mention of cell phones — made her think of some eternal fluidity of time in songs for the first time.
“It’s the folly of the artist to think, ‘Oh, I’m coming with this stuff out of my brain,’” Mitchell says. “It’s on the one hand a desire to write about things that are true for me right now, but they could have been true for someone else 100 years ago or a 100 years from now.”
Mitchell will tour through Omaha on Sunday in support of Patty Griffin at The Waiting Room. Tickets are available here. But first, she spoke to Hear Nebraska via phone about adapting her father’s prose to song, finding poetic authority in certain male archetypes even though she’s “not psyched about it” and the oddity of hearing her lyrics spoken aloud.
Listen to our full interview with Anaïs Mitchell here:
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. If you have the opportunity for one of your favorite living writers to just read you some lyrics, take it, young man. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.