ANAÏS MITCHELL, THE SONGBIRD

Hadestown was created, written, and composed by Anaïs Mitchell, a folk singer-songwriter from Vermont (Browne, 2019). While she is a Tony Award-winning book and score writer today, Broadway was never in Mitchell’s sight growing up. Her father was a novelist, teacher, and environmentalist who raised her on the music of Santana, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, inspiring Anaïs to become a folk artist herself (Browne, 2019). She learned how to play violin and guitar and began writing her own music to perform at local venues and folk festivals. After graduating with a degree from Middlebury College in Vermont in 2004, she was signed to Righteous Babe Records, an independent label run by her singer-songwriter hero, Ani DiFranco (Browne, 2019). Anaïs Mitchell’s folk music background makes her a unique musical theatre composer. While most Broadway songwriters primarily compose their scores on piano, Mitchell wrote Hadestown on guitar and violin, enabling her to imagine melodies for more diverse vocal types (Talks at Google, 2019).

Mitchell claims the idea for Hadestown first came to her while driving to see her long-distance boyfriend in her early twenties. She remembers the following lyrics came to her in the car: 

“Wait for me, I’m coming / In my garters and pearls / With what melody did you barter me / From the wicked underworld?” (Mitchell, 2020, p. 128). 

While those original lyrics did not make it into the final show, its melody is the base of “Wait For Me.” To her, the words evoked an old story she read as a kid: the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (Mitchell, 2020, p. 128). Mitchell was always drawn to Greek mythology, having loved D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths as a child (Browne, 2019). She told the New York Times in 2019 that she loved the Orpheus and Eurydice myth because “it’s a tragic story that’s set up for the Hollywood ending and you don’t get it… There’s something about it that feels real, about the frailty of man.’” (Browne, 2019). So, she began writing a folk opera based on her favorite myth, under the working title “A Crack in the Wall” (Mitchell, 2020, p. 3). In 2006, she replaced the name with “Hadestown” (Mitchell, 2020, p. 83).