Anaïs Mitchell on going solo again after her hit musical Hadestown

“I never thought I’d see the other side of Hadestown,” says Anaïs Mitchell of her folk opera, which reimagines the Orpheus myth in Depression-era America and which has occupied most of the past 15 years of her life.

Hadestown began as a DIY theatre production in 2006, when Mitchell, who wrote the music, book and lyrics, and a rotating roster of local musicians toured the show across small venues in Vermont, travelling in a donated school bus. It evolved through a concept album to a show, by now a New Orleans-flavoured mix of folk, jazz, gospel and cabaret, which moved to Broadway in 2019 and won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

Even today, a large tattoo of the album’s cover art — a stencilled Persephone holding a pomegranate flower while shrouded in darkness — lives on her arm. But now, as Mitchell, 40, prepares to release her first solo album of new material in a decade, self-titled, she’s letting go of Hadestown and telling her own stories.

I’m not 25 any more. I’m not falling in love and having my heart broken

For all her songwriting life — this is her fifth solo album — Mitchell has been trawling for what she calls “the mythic stuff”, that which reveals our connection to the universe. Previously, she accessed it by drawing heroic characters; now, in the new album, she sees it in herself.

“This record is different in that it’s not larger-than-life — it’s life-sized,” she says on a call from Vermont. “Heroes aren’t usually young, and what I think is fun about the album is that I’m not 25 any more. I’m not falling in love and having my heart broken. It was a revelation to feel like I have something to say about my life.”

Several of the songs — the haunting and melancholy “Revenant”, slow jam “Bright Star”, the woozy Americana of “Backroads” — are Mitchell’s tributes to a younger version of herself, when she was full of longing, yet to make a mark on the world. “The Words” is a meta-commentary on the process of writing. “It’s hard when you think you could be living your life but are instead banging your head against the wall trying to make a rhyme,” she says.

Vermont was a powerful inspiration for the album. In spring 2020, nine months pregnant as the pandemic set in, she made a last-minute decision to move from New York and to have the baby on the farm in Addison county where she grew up. As when she was a child, Mitchell spent most of her days taking hikes across the farm and to the reservoir where she used to hang out during high school. Standing at that spot, called the Watershed, with her newborn baby strapped to her chest, Mitchell realised she had both a song title for the new album and a word to define her life at that moment.

It had been years since Mitchell had been filled with so much creative energy. “Not that I wasn’t creative while working on Hadestown, but there was something about the process of getting into this, being completely absorbed and open to where the songs wanted to go . . . that I had less anxiety about the results,” she says.

Mitchell recorded the album in New York in December 2020. Produced by Josh Kaufman (Mitchell’s bandmate in the astral folk project Bonny Light Horseman), it is unwaveringly warm, amorous, gorgeously soporific.

Some months after recording, she took a trip to New York just as the city and Broadway were making their return from pandemic shutdown. It was Hadestown’s first night back. “I spent the whole first act of the show brainstorming in my head, thinking that I need to do another musical,” she says. “The musical itself — the choreo, the orchestration, all of the elements coming together — there’s nothing like it, as far as an art form goes.”

But Hadestown is not her any more. “It’s been a long, slow, humbling process of realising I’m no longer a necessary part of Hadestown,” Mitchell says. “I’m grateful to have had that experience, of really going all the way with one idea, as long as it took, and also [now] to be on the other side of that and feel a sense of creative possibilities.”

‘Anais Mitchell’ is released on January 28, anaismitchell.com