Anaïs Mitchell – Anaïs Mitchell
BMG – 28 January 2022
Although Anaïs Mitchell released Bonny Light Horseman, a band album with Eric D. Johnson and Josh Kaufman, in 2020, this is Mitchell’s first solo album of new material in a decade (since 2012’s Young Man in America), the time between, taken up with her Tony and Grammy award-winning Hadestown musical project. As with many artists, however, lockdown gave her time to focus away from other distractions, albeit as a new mother, and reconnect with her own music, resulting in this terrific 10-track collection that, recorded in an old church studio just outside Woodstock, also features contributions from Bon Iver saxophonist Michael Lewis, multi-instrumentalist Kaufman, drummer JT Bates, The National’s Aaron Dessner on guitar and Thomas Bartlett on piano.
Mitchell, having relocated from Brooklyn to the family farm in Vermont for the pandemic, the writing, in her own voice rather than other characters, very much reflects a reconnection to her roots. It addresses both her youth, memory and relationships as well as ambition, although it opens with a love letter to New York. The gorgeous sax-caressed piano ballad Brooklyn Bridge, at peace with the world (“Over Brooklyn Bridge in a taxi/You and me in the backseat/Finally got you by my side/Riding high at the end of the night”), the lyric largely composed of the repeated refrain “Everything I want everything I want everything”.
Being at peace, back at her grandparents’ house with its “familiar chest of drawers”, is also the underlying theme of the gently strummed Bright Star, where she sings “I am home now from my roaming/I’m alone now in the gloaming/With the ships out in the yard”, but mingled with the restlessness that took her away (“You have launched a thousand longings”) in pursuit of dreams (“There are lengths to which you’ll never know I went/To be your lover/And beloved in your sight… When I first laid eyes upon you/I was filled with such a longing/To be with you in the dark”) as she reflects “We’re as young as we’ll ever be/Old as we ever been”.
Being back in Vermont and the house also spurred the childhood memories of the equally musically ruminative, airy Revenant, inspired by sorting through journals and letters belonging to herself and her late grandmother (“Come and let me hold you in my arms/Come and get my shoulder wet and warm/Come and show me what it is you want”) as she reflects “We’re as young as we’ll ever be/Old as we ever been”. Taking the tempo up to a walking rhythm, the loss of someone close also underpins On Your Way (Felix Song), written for her friend, producer and fellow musician Edward ‘Felix’ McTeigue, who died in 2020, remembering with joy rather than sorrow (“You wouldn’t have wanted me to cry …You wouldn’t want me haunted by…The song we never got to write”) and times spent together (“I remember when you were a seeker/Staring into a stereo speaker/Kick drum and someone singing/Made you one with everything/I remember when your tape was rolling/You were going where the take was going”), adopting a musical metaphor for making the most of what life offers you (“Tonight my tape is rolling/I’m going where the take is going/No regrets and no mistakes/You get one take”).
Doubtlessly equally inspired by returning to Vermont, the brief, acoustic Real World is a hymn to the simple, truthful life away from artificiality and pretence (“I wanna lie in the real grass/Watch the real clouds/Rolling past the pastures… I wanna talk with my mouth full/Pass around a vegetables with/Real folks at a real table”).
Opening with a resonant strummed guitar, Backroads is again a song rooted in memories, here the hurt of a break up (“Young, in love and it’s down my eyes/Never gonna hurt like the first time/Pullin’ over on a shoulder/Let the tears drops roll”) but, set on the same night; it opens with a striking image about police racism that underscores two different Americas, one where she’s in the car with her lover, “Daredevil on a joyride/Thought you were a rebel of some kind/Angels watching over all the time”, while a “Different cop on the same night/Stopped a kid about a tail light/Somebody thought it didn’t look right/Might as well have said he didn’t look white/Might’ve rode all night and gone far/Had he been ridin’ in a different car”.
She also weaves social comment into Little Big Girl, a song that reflects on how the ageing process can affect women in a different way in terms of self-perception (“How come you’re ashamed to show your face without your make-up on?Maybe you should face that you’re ashamed to not be young”) but also how this is influenced by gender inequality where women “Grow up underneath the gaze of many grown men’s eyes” and the feeling of being subject to their desires (“All grown up and somehow still afraid to disappoint someone/Let him have his way instead of saying what you want”), the line about seeing her reflection and imagining it’s her mother reinforcing how the cycle continues.
That anxiety about growing older is echoed in the bittersweet Now You Know, with its piano, electric guitar solo and somewhat Velvet Underground rhythmic bassline echoes, written as the singer’s response to a lover asking why she’s crying, that opens with “When I think about dying/I think about children/And when I think about children/I think about you/And when I think about you/I feel like crying/Crying for my youth” and, flipping the sequential lyric, ends “when we make love/I think about children/And I think about dying”.
She returns, however, to peace and calm for The Words for a memory of a time without worldly worries (“Meanwhile the birds sing/Meanwhile the church bells ring/Meanwhile the children laughing…Penny for a child’s thoughts/Can you tell me what it costs?/Can you tell me what it’s worth?…Never mind you run and play/Who needs pennies anyway?/Outside it’s a sunny day”).
It ends with the slow-building, softly sung piano ballad Watershed, a song about self-determination and perseverance to overcome the trials and tribulations, but how they also make you what you are (“you’ll keep climbing step by step/By the grace of God and by your own sweat/And a river of tears that you won’t forget/But you will forgive if you haven’t yet/’Cause they carved the path/That you had to tread/And they’ll do it again for the path ahead”) and the acknowledgement that “the heaven you seek is not separate/From the heart that speaks/When your cheeks are wet”.
Drawing on the past and looking to the future, Anaïs Mitchell is a quietly affecting and beguiling work, delivered with quiet, introspective emotion and perfectly attuned musical arrangements. “You climbed one mountain/And you found the next/Followed the river to the fountainhead”, she reminds herself. Immerse yourself in these waters and drink deep.
Order/Stream Anaïs Mitchell: https://anaismitchell.lnk.to/Album