Anaïs Mitchell

Prepare Yourself For Hadestown

Anaïs Mitchell’s forthcoming album, Hadestown may not seem the most accessible of upcoming releases, but it’s certainly intriguing. In a musical world dominated by snack-food MP3 bites, she has bucked the trend to produce almost an hour’s worth of folk-opera about the mythological tale of the ancient Greek “father of songs” Orpheus, rescuing his wife Eurydice from the underworld. Casting herself as the ill-fated Eurydice, she has recruited the talents of some of the brightest and best of her contemporaries to fill the shoes of the other characters: Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon is Orpheus, The Low Anthem’s Ben Knox Miller is Hermes and Greg Brown plays Hades, the underworld-ruling husband of Persephone, played by Ani DiFranco. Speaking to Spinner, she said “People brought a lot of their own personality and also their own melodic sensibility. Everyone sings differently and it was really great that everyone sort of made the songs their own. We got all the soul of the people that got involved.” The stage version of Hadestown made its debut in the theaters of Vermont in 2006 and this release is the culmination of that board-treading hard work. The album is due for a US release on March 9.