By Tom Huntington
ARTS CORRESPONDENT
“Small town stars that shone
And all night long they seemed to say
You are one of our own
Hey you might be someone someday”
So sings Anaïs Mitchell on “Backroads,” a telling coming-of-age tune on her new self-titled album. Released two weeks ago on BMG, the album is Mitchell’s first collection of all-new material under her own name since 2012’s “Young Man in America.”
The Grammy Award-winning Vermont singer-songwriter celebrated the occasion with area shows in Hanover, New Hampshire, on Tuesday, Feb. 15. The festivities continue with a show in Burlington on Saturday, Feb. 19.
The native of New Haven in Addison County pulls double duty as part of Bonny Light Horseman, her widely lauded folk group with Eric D. Johnson (Fruit Bats) and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman (and drummer JT Bates and bassist/saxophonist Mike Lewis), which performs an opening set and then backs Mitchell during her headline set.
Bonny Light Horseman, which earned a Grammy nomination for “Best Folk Album” for its gorgeous self-titled 2020 debut album, has written and recorded a follow-up album, according to Mitchell, who said the album is scheduled for release this fall.
Mitchell’s new 10-song set was produced by Kaufman, who also performs on the album along with Bates (Big Red Machine) and Lewis (Bon Iver) in addition to Aaron Dessner of the National and Brattleboro-born, Putney-raised keyboardist/producer Thomas Bartlett.
A welcome return to form for Mitchell, the album is a decidedly personal and deeply poignant set of songs that reintroduces listeners to this singular singer-songwriter from the Green Mountain State.
Reconnecting with her childhood roots — which she describes as “a very free, imaginative, creative time” — Mitchell was inspired to write such introspective gems as the beautifully assured “Bright Star” and the pretty and understated “Revenant.”
Other album highlights include the pointed and passionate “Little Big Girl,” the soaring “On Your Way (Felix Song)” — inspired by Mitchell’s late friend, musician Felix McTeigue, from her “hustling days” as a songwriter in New York — and the spellbinding self-reflective closer, “Watershed.”
Mitchell, now 40, fled New York at the onset of the pandemic — nine-months pregnant with her now 2-year-old daughter Rosetta — living with her extended family at her childhood farmhouse in Addison County before moving with her family (husband Noah Hahn and daughter Ramona, 8) to a house in Bristol.
The exodus followed a whirlwind seven-year stretch that found Mitchell’s Vermont-born folk opera “Hadestown” grow into a Broadway phenomenon that has garnered glowing accolades in addition to multiple Tony and Grammy Awards.
Mitchell took time out to answer some questions via email Monday, three days after her tour kickoff in Iowa. Here are excerpts from the interview (edited for conciseness):
Q: Why did you decide to self-title the album?
A: I didn’t set out to do this, but when I looked back at all the songs I’d written for this album, I realized that they were all written in my own voice; that is, the speaker in the songs is me, and the stories are my own stories.
I’ve never actually done that before, like oftentimes in my songs I’ll sort of dress up in the clothing of other characters, other voices. These just have no disguise. It’s a very heart-on-the-sleeve record and after a decade of releasing music NOT under my own name, it felt right to self-title this one.
Q: This album seems to be a definitive piece of work for you. How do you feel about this collection in comparison to your previous albums?
A: There was something about the writing and the recording of this one that felt all very flowy and immediate. All of the songs except one were written or at least finished during the summer and fall of 2020.
After working on ‘Hadestown’ for so long, it felt like a radical and joyful and mysterious thing to be writing regular old songwriter songs again. And the recording we made also felt very immediate, mostly live-tracked in a room with friends at a time when we were all so grateful to be able to be in a room together at all, let alone doing what we loved.
Q: How did the experience of moving back to Vermont at the onset of the pandemic affect you and the songs on this album?
A: I know for sure this is an album I couldn’t have written from New York, though our move back was completely unplanned. I was nine months pregnant with our second daughter when the pandemic reached the city and we made an 11th-hour decision to leave so I could give birth in Vermont.
Rosetta was born a week later and then there we were, on the family farm, completely locked down with this tiny baby (and my entire family). We moved into the house that belonged to my grandparents when they were alive. There were a lot of ways in which I felt I was re-meeting my childhood and also confronting the age I am now. That stuff made its way into the songs.
Q: It sounds like your life was quite a whirlwind before leaving New York, and it’s been 10 years since your last Anaïs Mitchell album. How has it felt to connect with your own music after so long?
A: We lived in New York for seven years, not quite consecutively, and most of that time was really dominated by my work on ‘Hadestown.’ I was quite obsessed with it and the process of rewriting it over and over to try to get it to Broadway.
Looking back, I came to a place where I was living in a sort of unsustainable way — easy to do in New York! Just not sleeping or eating right, feeling torn a lot between my kids — well, there was just one kid back then — and the goings-on of the city.
When we got to Vermont, I felt like there was a clearing in my heart. I could see the stars again. I could walk in the woods. I spent long days just hanging out with my family and making food. it was quiet, I could hear myself, and I guess in some way, I could hear the muse again. It was like a long cool drink of water.
Q: You’ve had so much success in recent years, but it must be amazing to be the headline performer at The Flynn and other venues.
A: I’m thrilled to be on the road again at all! It’s been so tricky for live performance of any kind, and we had to cancel/postpone the first seven dates of this tour due to the omicron surge. So we’re just feeling a ton of gratitude to be able to be together making music in front of a live audience, which takes a lot of commitment on the part of the audience as well.
I used to (go to) big and magical shows at The Flynn as a little girl — it’s an honor to headline there!
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