Anaïs Mitchell Announces First Solo Album In Over A Decade

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Anaïs Mitchell has announced today her first solo record in over a decade. The self-titled full-length will be available on 28th January 2022 via BMG.

This long delay is owed to the success surrounding Hadestown, a musical project she began in Vermont in 2006 that has grown into a Tony®- and Grammy®-award-winning Broadway phenomenon with touring editions now delighting audiences as far away as South Korea.

“I experienced so much joy working on Hadestown, but it just kept ramping up and up and requiring more and more attention,” Mitchell admits. “I had to become so single-minded and really put blinders on to my other creative life.”

As it did for many artists, the COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly offered Mitchell a blank slate to reconnect with her own music. The result is a new self-titled album made with close collaborators from Bon Iver, The National and her own band Bonny Light Horseman, Mitchell’s first collection of all-new material under her own name since 2012’s Young Man in America.

“I was nine months pregnant when the pandemic reached New York, so we made an 11th hour decision to leave and have the baby in Vermont,” Mitchell recalls. “We left the city and had the baby a week later, and then like everyone, we were in the midst of this unprecedented stillness. It felt like I could see behind me: oh, there’s New York City. There’s Hadestown. There’s my life with just one kid. A certain kind of stress and expectations. In Vermont, we moved onto my family farm and lived in my grandparents’ old house, with a new baby. I’d look at pictures on my phone from a few months earlier and wonder, whose life was that? This record, and the songs that are on it, came out of that time. I got into a flow again that I hadn’t felt in a really long time.”

Produced by Josh Kaufman, the 10-song album also features core players including Kaufman, Michael Lewis, JT Bates, Thomas Bartlett and Aaron Dessner, with string and flute arrangements provided by Nico Muhly. Dubbed by NPR as “one of the greatest songwriters of her generation,” the Vermont-based Mitchell is a master of the worlds of narrative folk song, poetry and balladry, and the 10 songs on this record are a perfect showcase of her skills. In addition, Mitchell has also shared the album’s stunning first single, “Bright Star.”

After leaving her life in Brooklyn at nine months pregnant and moving back home during the pandemic, the album chronicles Mitchell’s reconnection with the Vermont roots that have been so formative in her life and music. “Bright Star” finds her making peace with the idea of being at peace in the familiar setting of her grandparents’ house.

“During the first pandemic summer I was staying on the family farm where I grew up, in a little house that belonged to my grandparents when they were alive. I could see the stars for the first time in a long time,” Mitchell recalled. “I wasn’t traveling anywhere, or even doing much of anything, for the first time in a long time. ‘Bright Star’ is about looking back on years of restless pursuit and making peace with the source of that longing: the Muse, the Great Unknown, the One That Got Away — those things that motivate us that we never can touch.” 

Mitchell will debut the new material during various headline tours in the U.S. and Europe in 2022 (see European dates below), at which she’ll be accompanied by players from the album. On stage, she can’t wait to further hone the sights, sounds and scenes that bring the songs to such vivid life. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to write in the voice of other characters, especially with Hadestown. It’s fun for me, but these songs are not that,” she says. “Weirdly, they’re all me. The narrator is me. That’s why it felt right to self-title the album. It felt like after so many years of working on telling other stories, now here are some of mine.”

Anaïs Mitchell Tracklisting:

1. Brooklyn Bridge
2. Bright Star
3. Revenant 
4. On Your Way (Felix Song)
5. Real World
6. Backroads
7. Little Big Girl
8. Now You Know
9. The Words
10. Watershed

Pre-order/pre-save here: https://anaismitchell.lnk.to/Album

Anaïs Mitchell Live (2022):

29^th August – St Luke’s, Cork

30^th August – Pepper Canister Church, Dublin

31^st August – Philharmonic Music Hall, Liverpool

1^st September – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

3^rd November – Lido, Berlin

4^th November – Mojo, Hamburg

8^th November – Les Etoiles, Paris

9^th November – Botanique, Brussels

11^th November – YES, Manchester 

12^th November – St Luke’s, Glasgow

13^th November – Newcastle University Student Union

14^th November – Fleece, Bristol

15^th November – KOKO. London

photo credit: Jay Sansone