On song: Rebecca Hardy interviews musician and playwright Anaïs Mitchell

‘I wanted my songs to have more questions than answers.’

There’s a line in an Anaïs Mitchell song that goes: ‘And there ain’t a thing that you can do / When the weather takes a turn on you / Except for hurry up and hit the road / Any way the wind blows.’ The song is ‘Any Way the Wind Blows’ and I thought of it often during the tumultuous last two years. It turns out that these lyrics were a timely precursor of the songwriter’s lockdown experiences too. Like many people, Mitchell had a life-changing pandemic, although for her it turned out to be a more welcome escape. The esteemed Quaker-raised singer-songwriter found herself transported from the brownstone houses of Brooklyn to the rural lowlands of her native Vermont, living in her grandfather’s house with her newborn baby, where she says ‘she could see the stars for the first time in a long time’. The result was a new self-titled record, her first solo album for a decade, after the run-away success of the folk opera Hadestown which won eight awards, including Best Musical, at the 2019 Tony Awards.

Featuring a range of contributors including Aaron Dessner and Nico Muhly, she has described the album’s lead song ‘Bright Star’ as about ‘looking back on years of restless pursuit… 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’.

If that sounds Quakerly, it’s probably because the acclaimed indie-folk star spent her formative years growing up surrounded by Friends. ‘My parents became Quakers at first as a response to the Vietnam war,’ she tells me. ‘My mom stayed with it and became very active with the Meeting, so I was raised within that community, and when I was a teenager I loved attending Quaker youth stuff. It was this beautiful scene: an alternative to my rural public high school. It felt so safe to be whoever you were at those things. The kids were all similarly principled and caring, but, within that similarity, there were a lot of freak flags flying. I loved that. I don’t attend Meeting now, so I’m not sure I get to regard myself as a Quaker, but I have a lot of love and affinity for Quaker values, and my eight-year-old now attends Quaker First Day School virtually. I didn’t push that on her; she loves it.’

There’s little doubt that the musician’s Quaker background has had a profound influence on her. She often speaks out about her roots in interviews, drawing easy loops between her creative process and Spirit-bothering upbringing. In Boulder Weekly, for example, she says: ‘I was raised Quaker and there is this idea in the Quaker faith of a calling, that the spirit moves you to do something and moving with that is the way to live right. I always knew singing was what I was meant to do, but I’ll never know where it will lead.’

Does the experience of centering down and connecting with ‘the Source’ – or whatever expression you use – have parallels with the act of creating music, I ask. ‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘I was talking to a (rather spiritual) friend recently, kind of lamenting the fact that I didn’t have a meditation practice. And she said, “but you have your writing”. This is true, my writing practice is my spiritual practice. However much elbow grease goes into the writing, it is at the beginning and end of the day a collaboration with the mystery, and there’s a process of opening yourself to that source that can’t be called other than spiritual.’

I’d love to know more about the creative process involved in writing a piece of music, I tell her. Could she tell us a little about how it comes together and whether the ‘active waiting’ she learnt in Quakerism plays a part?

‘That’s amazing,’ she says. ‘I never heard that phrase “active waiting” but I know just what you mean in the context of Quakerism, and it is the exact same thing one does in songwriting. I never connected those dots before but you’re right that it’s very similar. For me oftentimes the act of writing is the act of waiting.’

Does she feel that she taps into this transcendental state when immersed in music? Does she feel that her music is divinely guided at all?

‘Yes, certainly,’ she says. ‘But again, it’s a collaboration! My experience isn’t that I get out of the way and the spirit moves through. It’s like, the spirit drops in, then disappears for weeks while I try to make sense of the thing, then the spirit drops in again. I feel this about performance as well! It’s not like I go out there and channel from start to finish. I go out there, say something awkward, feel proud one second, insecure the next, and then at some point, if I’m lucky, I get out of the way and the spirit moves through. And if that even happens once in a show – if I feel like I’m channeling for just a sec – then I feel like it was a good show.’

For her, the whole process is slightly akin to magic: she has talked in other interviews about her hope that if ‘the words are all put together in the right way that some sort of alchemical thing happens with the song, that it will sort of give it life, or wings’. ‘For me with writing, I’m usually chasing two things,’ she tells me. ‘One is the sound of the language, making it sound right, whatever that means, which is a deep and ancient practice. Two is the choice of imagery. The Canadian songwriter Ferron once told me “when you say a word, you summon a spirit”. This is what images do, summon spirits, and they do a thing with each other, and the order in which they’re summoned means a lot.’

Anaïs Mitchell first felt a strong calling to make music when she was a child. ‘I feel so grateful to have had a calling for as long as I can remember,’ she tells me. ‘I get curious about different aspects of the calling, like working on a musical, or collaborating with different folks, or teaching; but the calling itself has remained constant and for this I’m so grateful.’

Surrounded by Quaker peaceniks (her parents were acquaintances with Leonard Cohen before she was born, when they lived on an Greek island), did that background in the peace movement have a big effect on her musical influences?

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We had that Rise Up Singing songbook (the first one!) in the house and it’s where I first encountered a lot of folk music, protest songs, rounds, and ballads. I grew up in Vermont which in the sixties and seventies embraced a huge influx of hippie back-to-the-landers, my parents included, and that sort of music was just in the air. As a young songwriter I was very inspired by early Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, the idea of approaching politics in song. Later I tried to write in that way and it no longer felt like my path. I wanted to let songs be songs, be stories, be emotional, and not ask of them that they be essays, letters-to-the-editor, or have answers. I wanted them to have more questions than answers.’

Her songs now are known for their emotional simplicity and raw story-telling power, but there have been strong social undertones in the past. The rousing ‘Why We Build the Wall’, from Hadestown, was apparently inspired by gated communities and class conflict in the US. She is also a political science major, whose number one issue, she tells me, is ‘confronting the threat and reality of climate change’. ‘Number two is reimagining our godforsaken healthcare “system” in which the rich can afford care, the poor cannot, and insurance and pharmaceutical companies profit at the expense of our collective health.’

She also comes from a strongly political background. Her mother, Cheryl, was an activist and founder of multiple social justice nonprofits, while her husband, Noah, helped found the collective worker-owned Langdon Street Café in Montpelier, Vermont, which was apparently inspired by her brother’s writings on ‘syndicalism’ as an alternative to capitalism. 

The collaborative, homespun focus of her husband’s café – with its regular roster of music, lectures, poetry, readings, speak-outs and activist meetings – was reputedly an early inspiration for Hadestown, which started as a DIY theatre project in 2006, drawing on local, fringe performers, and later becoming a studio album featuring Ani DiFranco and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. It took years of rewriting – with performances in London, Edmonton and at New York Theatre Workshop – before it finally made it big on Broadway in 2019. I wonder if this love of collaboration and grassroots may hark back to her Quaker conscience-raising youth, where people weren’t afraid to experiment or, in her words, ‘freak flag wave’?

Her grandparents, she tells me, while not being Quakers, embodied a spirit of equality that stayed with her. ‘They were a fascinating mix of atheist (my grandpa), agnostic (my grandma) and the most principled, generous people I’ve ever known. Come to think of it, they truly embodied a few Quaker values even though they weren’t Friends. “Walk cheerfully, answering that of God in everyone” – that was my grandma. They believed in treating everyone as equals, and with respect. My grandma famously met Albert Einstein one time in line at the cinema and chatted him up just as she did everyone she met: a doorman, a waitress, a person sleeping on the street. Both of them devoted a lot of time to volunteer work. Their home was a place of joy and I’ll never forget it.’

This family farm became a sanctuary during the first summer of the pandemic, she says, protecting her from some of the challenges that other musicians faced during the crisis. Does she see any positive signs of hope for musicians who haven’t fared so well during the pandemic? Are things improving?

‘For me, gratefully, I and my family experienced the other side of the coin of this traumatic time, which was the extraordinary healing quality of stillness. We were able to unplug in ways I had forgotten were even possible. I know we were in a position of privilege. Because of our time on Broadway we felt secure financially, whereas for many songwriters, their ability to make a living is directly related to their touring income from month to month, so if touring disappears, so does their livelihood. Artists of all stripes though are resourceful and committed to finding ways to make art happen. I joined various Patreon communities this year and I love it.’

Your songs often tell stories in the folk tradition and are known for being intimate and honest, I say. Does she think that the world needs more art that isn’t afraid of being emotionally open – telling stories of heartbreak and war, for example? Does music have an imperative to tell the truth, and that is what it can offer the world – open windows to people’s souls?

Her answer is characteristically reflective. ‘I think there’s room for all kinds of music in this world,’ she muses. ‘Music that speaks at different chakra-levels if you will. Some music makes you want to dance, and that’s it’s job, and it’s important and beautiful. Some music makes you cry, or, I’ve heard it said that we should say “lets you cry” rather than “makes you cry”; and, for whatever reason, with my own songs, that’s often I think what I’m after. A song that lets you cry.’                     

Rebecca is the journalist at the Friend. Anaïs Mitchell’s self-titled record will be released on 28 January.

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