Mitchell studied violin in school and, like many an aspiring singer-songwriter, migrated to guitar soon after. Raising a few thousand dollars by way of an early version of crowd-funding — emailing her fan base and asking them to pitch in in exchange for T-shirts and other merch — Mitchell worked on the audio version of Hadestown for over a year. The Musical. [7] Unlike the original live recording, the Broadway cast recording contains the complete score. We want to hear from you! The 40-track recording won Best Musical Theater Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards. The staging was threadbare — think of those phone cords — and the show featured fewer songs and more instrumentals than it does now. [5][6] A compact disc and vinyl release followed on November 1 and November 29, 2019 respectively. [2] The live album was recorded from the June 28 and 29, 2016 performances. After working on Hadestown for well over a decade, she’s again veering back to music for her next project. Pink Floyd has one. “I had a few songs but I wasn’t putting my focus on the project until I applied for that grant,” she says, “and then I was like, ‘Holy shit, now I have to write this opera!’”. “That mystery has brought people back to it again and again. We got deep into editing & mixing these (beautiful! “It was just a bunch of friends coming together, and we made it happen on very little money with very little time.” The following year, she and her troupe took the makeshift musical on a seven-day, 10-city tour of Vermont and a bit of Massachusetts, schlepping costumes and instruments. “I had never seen him live before and I was so blown away by that performance,” says Mitchell, sporting a denim jacket and a bleach-blonde hair that makes her look more downtown than midtown Manhattan. The Musical. She updated the setting to the Depression era, which allowed her to incorporate a wide swatch of American music (jazz, folk, swing) and touch upon cultural and political cross currents like the Dust Bowl storms of the Thirties (“a vintage version of what we’re seeing now with climate change”). But in a sign of her burgeoning ambition, she also began contemplating a conceptual piece built around the mythological characters she had once read about. All tracks are written by Anaïs Mitchell. “It wasn’t nearly as developed as it is now, but the core songs were there and I thought, ‘Good songs, man — this girl does it.’ So I got behind it.” DiFranco became one of the guest singers on the Hadestown album, along with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Mitchell herself stopped performing in the show after 2007: “I’ve always been more ambitious as a writer than a performer. “I didn’t realize how much I wanted that until they said it,” she says. [9], If The Fates Allow: A Hadestown Holiday Album is an upcoming christmas album by the Original Broadway Cast of Hadestown, scheduled for release on November 20, 2020 through Broadway Records. And then the Fates come up and cut the cord, and I’m dead!” She stops turning and laughs. As back then, the score is steeped in folk, pop, work-song and New Orleans. Thanks to its guests and fleshed-out arrangements that encompassed cabaret, choral pop and jazz, Hadestown shone like never before on record. Mitchell hasn’t yet sketched out what she may say in the 90 seconds that winners are allowed onstage. “People keep asking me about [a new musical], but I’d to make solo records and songs,” she says. Mitchell and Hadestown have traveled a long, long way since then. I needed the wind in my sails again.”, After an Off-Broadway run at New York Theatre Workshop in 2016, the idea of Broadway was floated, and Mitchell didn’t discourage the thought. [3] The recording does not contain every song from the production. Musicals based on non-show-tune pop songs are now a seemingly permanent part of the Broadway landscape, but few have such an elongated origin story as Hadestown. On the far more immediate horizon are the Tonys. The Myth. “The first time I thought maybe it was a fluke, but the second time, I thought, ‘Maybe this is who this country wants and who this country is.’ So Hadestown became a mashup of me being an idealistic activist kid coming out of school, and then hitting the reality of the world and seeing this guy getting elected again and not knowing how deep the corruption was. Hadestown also has a newly resonant moment in the dirge “Why We Build the Wall,” which Hades (played by Patrick Page) sings to rally his underworld crew. Live Original Cast Recording)", "Hadestown to Record Live Cast Album at New York Theatre Workshop", "Hadestown First Listen: Hear 3 Songs From the New Broadway Cast Recording", "David! Patrick Page and Amber Gray in ‘Hadestown’ on Broadway. The story could have ended there, but in 2012, Mitchell met director Rachel Chavkin, and the two began workshopping the show, resulting in additional songs and dialogue. With Fruit Bats frontman Eric D. Johnson and guitarist Josh Kaufman, a recurring member of Josh Ritter’s band, she’s formed a band, Bonny Light Horseman, and is cutting an album of songs rooted in British folk, a genre she explored on her 2013 album Child Ballads. “It’s nice to be in the world of music again.”. Ani DiFranco, Broadway, long reads, Musical, Tony Awards. “We got some advice from someone at a Tony nominee thing,” Mitchell mulls, “who said, ‘There’s not a lot of time and there are too many people to thank to thank them all,’ so I may think about that kid in Akron who’s in high school drama program and watching the Tonys. We care sooooo much about this music and we know you do too— thank you for your patience from the bottom of our hearts! Hadestown is currently playing in the same theater, the Walter Kerr, that hosted Springsteen on Broadway. The song "Why We Build the Wall" has been covered by a variety of artists including English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg for his 2017 EP Bridges Not Walls, Ben Fisher, Ben Dunham, Lilli Lewis, and Robert Neustadt. The Musical. It was released digitally and on CD on October 6, 2017 through Ghostlight Records and Parlophone Records. The set of Hadestown, the Broadway musical up for 14 Tony Awards on June 9th, incorporates wildly swinging lamps and a trap door that hurls people into the underworld. It felt really cool that he was in there before us. Want more Rolling Stone? Character description, analysis and casting breakdown for The Fates (3) from Hadestown The show’s 2016 Off-Broadway period coincided with Trump’s campaign, and Mitchell realized that song’s lyrics — “The wall keeps out the enemy/And we build the wall to keep us free/That’s why we build the wall” — were suddenly in tune with “build that wall” cries at Trump rallies. (Mitchell had opened for Bon Iver on a European tour and, one drunken night, worked up the courage to ask Vernon to contribute to the record.) The album features "beloved holiday classics as well as songs composed by Gonzalez-Nacer, Hadestown’s Tony-winning songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, and Hadestown music director Liam Robinson". The show’s book — written by Mitchell, who also wrote all the words and music — has remained more or less the same since it debuted in 2006: the Greek-myth tale of Hades and his wife Persephone and, concurrently, Orpheus and his doomed lover Eurydice, set in both hell and the world above it. Hadestown: The Myth. By then, she had already met DiFranco, who signed her to her Righteous Babe label and released Mitchell’s second album, The Brightness, in 2007. “I’m so impressed with Anaïs having the patience and the maturity to see that project through more than a decade of development,” DiFranco says. performances and realized we just need more time! In addition, various songs from Hadestown were re-recorded by Mitchell for her 2014 studio album Xoa, including the musical's opening number "Anyway the Wind Blows" which had not appeared on the original concept album. Hadestown: The Myth. “We went through a lot of phone cords.”. Principal vocals will be provided by Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer, Kay Trinidad, and Jewelle Blackman, with additional appearances from the rest of the cast. Sign up for our newsletter. It was originally announced to be released on June 7, 2019 on all major digital and streaming platforms, but on May 31 it was revealed that due to delays in production only a selection of music would be released on that date, with the rest of the cast album released in "character drops" over the course of the next few weeks, with the full album available on July 26. The original title was A Crack in the Wall, but after writing a song “Way Down Hadestown,” Mitchell realized one of those words would make a better title. Hadestown (Original Broadway Cast Recording) is the official recording of the Broadway production of Hadestown. What do they need to hear?”, In This Article: “He would go off-mic, but you could still hear him. “I never expected it to feel as relevant as it does now,” she says. “I don’t think I had that kind of maturity at her age.”, True to her outsider roots, Mitchell, who lives with her husband and grade-school daughter in Brooklyn, isn’t planning a follow-up musical any time soon. That eerie connection has only grown stronger during the actual Trump presidency.