Interview

Chris Watson has been wearing the same underwear for three days...

So I’m feeling a little self obsessed. I am very aware I may not smell fresh; I’ve been keeping a polite distance from people all day with this knowledge in the back of my head. Talking to Anais Mitchell this knowledge is very much in the forefront of my mind and I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything else.

Where I am is the 12 Bar Club in London where Anais (pronounced Uh-Nay-Us) has been playing sold out solo shows supported by Clarence Bucaro, Maia and Jamie Lawson for the last three nights.

The 12 Bar Club is one of those truly unique venues. It was originally a blacksmiths forge, and then it became a carpentry workshop before it then morphed into a guitar workshop. Guitars have a way of being played and before long regular jam nights were happening in the workshop. Before long the jam nights were more popular than the guitars and one of London’s most personal music venues was born, a venue born of a simple passion and love for music, an intimate venue perfect for Anais Mitchell and her delicately crafted songs.

The reason all I can think about is my own underwear is that Anais and I are standing in a cupboard so close together we can feel each others breath as we talk.

Between us is a tape recorder from the eighties that is as big as most laptops -I replaced my lost dictaphone with something a little harder to lose on the beach. I’m guessing Anais is worried about my massive and massively outdated technology because she keeps asking if it will pick up her voice. I assure her it will, but I don’t tell her the batteries are running out so I can’t play anything back until I get to a shop, mainly because I only realise this fact during a break in the interview where she meets the fans that have just watched her play. So far, so professional. All I need now is to lose the tape recorder afterwards and it will be Beardyman all over again, just without a shed being sacrificed as the flames dance reflected on the midnight surf.

Anais Mitchell has just released Hadestown, her most critically acclaimed album to date, a folk opera which is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus, a poet and singer of such ability that he believes he can rescue his dead wife Eurydice from the underworld with nothing more than his songs. “I’m not that good a story teller in real life like at a dinner party,” says Anais when I ask her about how she constructs stories with her songs. “But I really enjoy telling stories, songs that are stories, I’m a big fan of your [English] folk ballads and I guess the desire to do Hadestown was kind of a desire to tell a longer story, not just a three and a half minute story. Telling the story of Orpheus the greatest singer and song writer kinda gave me a narcissistic pleasure.” It’s also given her an album which has all the critics weeping with gratitude into their cynical, ink stained hands.

I ask Anais if she feels she is Orpheus, the singer and poet whose talent is so great that the birds stop singing to listen to him, and she just smiles and says, “I admire his optimism.”

All through Anais Mitchells past work runs a strong political thread and Hadestown is no different, though she is quick to point out that she is more interested in being truthful than protesting against any particular government. “At one point in my life,” she says. “I definitely was seeing stuff going on around me and thinking how could you not write about that? But nowadays I’m more interested in the emotional truth of politics… I guess I decided it’s not my job to tell people what to think, but more to give them questions.” She goes on, “I was interested in the idea of the underworld as this faceless bureaucratic place, a dark, political idea of the underworld I think came out of the time [as] those first songs were written at the end of the George W Bush era so a lot of feelings of dejection, about helplessness in the face of that and just the desire to tell a story.”

One particular song on Hadestown ‘Why We Build The Wall’, a song sung by Greg Brown who plays Hades, the ruler of Hadestown, is the most overtly political song on the album and has become a staple of Anais’s solo shows. It is also the one song that is shouted out by the crowd the whole show and the one that I hear being talked about as people leave.
In her Myspace blog Anais remarks on ‘Why We Build The Wall’ “People often say, “Oh, that’s just like Israel/Palestine, or that’s just like the US/Mexico border,” ” but when I ask if she is taking about America or The West she stresses that, “I don’t want to get that specific about it, it’s a sorta state of mind, a metaphoric place, archetypal.” And with the world being littered by the walls of history, such as Hadrian’s Wall or The Great Wall of China, you can’t help think she might have hit the metaphoric nail on the head. Some people have even said the song is about our own military model economies, but all Anais has done is wrote a song which is so true it means something to everyone who hears it and she says, “I can’t take credit for that, it just wrote itself.”

But ‘Why We Build The wall’ is just one song from an album which, though based in a fictitious depression era/post apocalyptic land and modelled on a classic myth, contains more true human emotions and human narratives than most novelists can manage in a whole career. But Anais, as humble as ever, is quick to point out that this was no solo effort, “I had some really great collaborators, I think we all kind of kept the wind in each others sails. I don’t think I would have had the energy for a project this big without those people behind me.” People such as Michael Chorney who wrote most of the arrangements, and Ben Matchstick who created the world of Hadestown, as well as all the friends, neighbours and people of Vermont who got behind the project and made it a reality.

For tonights show Anais is alone on stage with her guitar strapped to her front and a lurid pink and blue skull badge on the strap by her chest. The badge is a birthday present from one of the members of her now defunct eighties cover band SPUTNIK! which she says is “a badge for Eurydice. It’s girlish, it’s festive and it’s death.”

As Anais plays, the atmosphere is highly charged as the room is packed to capacity with people spilling out into the bar area beyond the door. She plays songs from all her albums, taking cues from the audience, as well as a few from Hadestown including ‘Our Lady of the Underground’ which is sung by Ani Defranco on the album, and ‘How Long’ which is a duet between Ani Defranco and Greg Brown, both rendered beautifully by Anais whose voice manages to be both powerful and fragile, naïve as well as shockingly mature. There are tears to be seen in many eyes.

Before I let Anais escape the cupboard we’re both trapped
                                                               in, I ask if we will get a
                                                               production of
                                                               Hadestown over here in
                                                               England anytime in the
                                                               near future but I don’t
                                                               get a definitive answer,
                                                               all I know is that Anais
                                                               Mitchell will be back in
                                                               October with her voice
                                                               and her guitar. I can
                                                               only hope for your sake
                                                               and mine that we will
                                                               eventually get to see the
                                                               Hadestown for
                                                               ourselves, but either
                                                               way, keep October free,
                                                               Anais is not someone
                                                               you want to miss again.

                                                               As I leave Anais gives
                                                               me a big grin and I’m
                                                               grinning back with a
                                                               wave, but behind the
                                                               smile I’m still thinking
                                                               about the irresponsible
                                                               behaviour that has led
                                                               me to be wearing the same underwear for three days in a row and I’m hoping beyond hope that no one has noticed. Self conscious and glad to be leaving I spill out into the night with thoughts of a shower and bed pacing my head. It’s only when I’m on the tube that I remember the questions I had prepared over the last few days, and also realise how pointless they all were.
All you really need to know is that Anais Mitchell is singing songs and telling stories about our lives, songs which are true and tell us more about ourselves than we like to admit. As she said before I shuffled off towards hot water and crisp cotton, “Everyone is the hero of their own story.” She grins before adding, “And that’s so beautiful to me.”