A Conversation with Anais Mitchell – HuffPost 2.29.12
Mike Ragogna: Anais, the track “Wilderland” from your new album Young Man In America, has a kind of Native American vibe. You describe cities and highways as being a wilderland with children wandering the wilderland. Is that what you see going on?
Anais Mitchell: Pretty sure that word ‘wilderland’ came into my head when I was watching some footage from the recession on television, these families getting evicted from their homes, all their furniture out in the street. The idea that even with the cities and the highways, this is a wild place, every man for himself. You can’t trust that you’ll be taken care of. Yeah, that track feels pretty tribal to me too. This lost modern tribe.
MR: The song segues into the album’s title track, “Young Man In America.” It’s an interesting title for what seems to be an autobiographical song, maybe beyond just a story song, about you being “shot out like a cannon ball” at birth and what follows. The title almost has an irony.
AM: Hmm, autobiographical could be a stretch, but I do identify with this young man and his restlessness. He shoots out of his mother’s womb like a cannonball, hungry and thirsty, running all over looking for pleasure and satisfaction. He’s terribly alone in the world, there’s no one to take care of him, he’s very desirous and very sad, and he calls out in a ritualistic way for a mother, a father, he’s looking for some kind of ancestral guidance.
MR: Beautiful. That leads us to your mostly piano ballad “Coming Down” in which you declare how you never felt so high and never laughed so loud. At the song’s end, you sing, “Nothing’s gonna stop me now.” Is this from personal experience?
AM: Yeah, I know that feeling, but then I think a lot of people feel that, in the midst of a great cacophonous good time, or the feeling you’re on a roll, that silent inner *ping* of emptiness.
MR: Young Man In America comes off like a concept album, and nice CSN-style backing vocals, by the way. Was that the intention?
AM: The last record I made was a tooootal concept thing, it was a folk opera based on the Orpheus myth called Hadestown, and all the characters were sung by these wonderful artists–Ani Difranco, Justin Vernon, and so on. So, compared to that thing, this one feels very loose and intimate. But I’m kind of a conceptual gal. I couldn’t help it, and this Young Man kept making his way into songs, along with certain themes–work, restlessness. Regarding the harmonies, well I think you hit it on the head earlier. I felt that some of the songs had a real ritualistic quality, and I wanted a sort of a small tribe of singers to help enact those rituals.
MR: Did you intentionally keep the production values simple and organic, or did this happen naturally as you tried to convey each song’s concept?
AM: I lay almost every last shred of credit for the production choices on this album at the door of Todd Sickafoose, the producer. He’s a bassist, a pianist, and a beautiful engineer, and as a producer, I see Todd as very cinematic, a storyteller. Many of these songs are really narrative and storyish just on the lyrical front, and I think Todd just let his imagination run, and told the stories musically alongside the lyric.
MR: Are there any songs on this album that have a particularly special story or connection to you personally and can you go into them?
AM: I wrote the song “Shepherd” based on a story my dad wrote as a young man. The book was called The Souls of Lambs and the shepherd is a character whose wife dies in childbirth as an indirect result of his own preoccupation with his work. In the story, it’s really no one’s fault what happens, but it’s just so sad. I think I was drawn to that story because I wrestle with some of the stuff my dad wrestled with back when he wrote it–he was about my age then, I’m thirty. Our relentless pursuits, whatever they may be, and the good precious real things that get plowed under them. A few of the songs on this album feel like letters to my father.
MR: What’s your creative process, especially during the writing process?
AM: I usually become obsessed by some little magic thing–a chord change or one line, words or melody–and then just follow that into the labyrinth. There’s a lot of banging up against walls and having to turn around and find another path. A lot of cutting room floor, usually. I do believe in the mystical power of sounds and images lined up in certain orders. The great songwriter Ferron once said, “Words summon spirits.” Such a simple thing… If you say “prairie dog,” the prairie dog spirit comes in the room. Then you say “hurricane,” and another one comes and they have chemistry together, this witches brew, and once the spell is written, you’re going to utter it over and over again, so, you might as well take care which spirits you summon. This is a big part of the creative process for me. Utter the stuff one thing after another in a quiet room and see what spirits it summons. If the wrong ones, utter different stuff.
MR: Anais, what advice do you have for new artists?
AM: Hmm…as an artist, I don’t believe you “find your voice” and then just get to keep it. I think it changes and you have to keep searching for it and that it requires constant vigilance to be true to it, whatever it is in this exact moment, which is a beautiful idea for the new artist because it kind of levels the playing field. You could be writing your very first song and tap into that thing that the person writing their hundredth song is having a hard time accessing. Also, I’d say the ego and the business of music–which is so trying for the ego–are powerfully corruptive, and we gotta be vigilant about that too. It’s so easy to forget that music feels good. It should feel good!
MR: What does the future hold for Anais Mitchell?
AM: Well we’ll be touring like crazy with this new record. I’m so excited about the small band I’m touring with–there are four of us–we’ll recreate some of the harmonies from the album, etc. Also working on developing the Hadestown opera for the theater from whence it came–it’s been living in purely audio land these past couple years. Also working on an acoustic collection of new versions of really old British and Scottish folk ballads with my comrade Jefferson Hamer, which we’ve been recording in Nashville with the gorgeous Gary Paczosa.