On song: Rebecca Hardy interviews musician and playwright Anaïs Mitchell

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

'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.' | Photo: by Jay Sansone

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.

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