Review: Anaïs Mitchell at The Brudenell

Anaïs Mitchell, with support from Carsie Blanton, played The Brudenell Social Club on 21 August.  Edie Hunter was there.

Anaïs Mitchell is an exceptionally talented singer-songwriter who has been compared with the likes of Gillian Welch and Josh Ritter.  Her songs are political but never sententious, emotional without being sentimental, and contemporary whilst drawing on ancient mythology and traditional folk ballads.  Following her ambitious 2010 and 2012 masterpiece albums, Hadestown and Young Man in America, both of which sat high on many people’s end-of-year lists, Mitchell developed the former record into a musical stage show that landed on Broadway in April of this year.  To date, Hadestown the musical has won eight Tony Awards, with Mitchell personally winning the accolades for Best Book and Best Original Score.  

Tonight, she is greeted in Leeds with warmth and reverence befitting a Broadway star, and I can’t recall the last time I stood in the darkness of the Brudenell Social Club and experienced such wonderfully hushed and good-humoured attentiveness from the audience.  Between each bout of enthusiastic applause and cheering, every face is turned towards the stage; trips to the bar are made in apologetic, hasty silence; people respectfully save their conversations for the interval.  Mitchell compliments us for being “quiet as mice,” and we all giggle shyly before someone helpfully explains, “We’re in awe!”  

She opens her pared-back, acoustic set with Out of Pawn from her first album The Brightness, which she dedicates to New Orleans, the city devastated in the 2005 floods following Hurricane Katrina.  Dressed in ripped skinny jeans and a sheer black shirt, she is relaxed and in excellent voice; it shimmers and squeaks and tweaks at our heartstrings, and my friend turns to me with tears in his eyes and says “She sounds JUST like the Anaïs Mitchell off the albums!”  Mitchell’s only accompanist tonight is Austin Nevins, a Portland-based producer and member of Josh Ritter’s Royal City Band, whose rich-toned and melodic Gretsch electric guitar perfectly complements her twinkling, finger-picked Martin acoustic, to the extent that they sound like a single instrument.  As Mitchell performs O My Star!, a song from her 2008 collaboration with Rachel Ries, Nevins contributes gorgeous bottle-neck slide and the audience melts.  

She spoils us with four songs from Young Man in America, a highly-acclaimed album that explores the experience of working class men growing up in rural USA.  It was written shortly after Mitchell’s grandfather died, when she saw her father for the first time “as another man’s son, something of an orphan”.  Tonight I find myself slightly missing the album’s layered and atmospheric production, but it’s fair to say that these stripped-back renditions of Wilderland and the title song give a starkness to Mitchell’s lyrics that really puts her storytelling centre-stage.  The protagonist bursts into life, “blowing like a hurricane”, ranting and railing against authority and desperate to make his mark on the world: “Everyone will know my name!”  He spends his money to make others envious, and holds his lover “like a sword and shield, up against this lonely world”. The performances have an energy and fierceness about them; the audience sings “oooh” to represent howling wolves, Mitchell’s guitar is punchy and driving, and Nevins’s subtly weaving motifs are slick with reverb that makes me think of spaghetti westerns, dustclouds and tumbleweeds.  

Shepherd, a ballad that Mitchell adapted from a story written by her father years earlier, is more true to the album version, with her idiosyncratic voice ringing pure and delicate and full of wavering vibrato; Nevins chimes in with exquisite harmonies that give me goosebumps.  Tailor, one of my favourite examples of her phenomenal songwriting, depicts a woman who has poignantly allowed her entire value to depend on what just one man thinks of her: “Now that he’s gone away, there isn’t anyone to say if I’m a lady gay, or a crazy woman… a diamond, or a dime-a-dozen.”  Nevins’s sensitive guitar solo causes Mitchell to sigh “yeahhhh!” and generates an elated response from the audience.  

There are treats in store for Hadestown fans as well.  All I’ve Ever Known and Wedding Song – the latter originally recorded as a duet between Mitchell and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver – are evidently familiar to most of the audience, and all around me lips mouth the words and people hum along with the instrumental sections.  There is a surprise segue into Gillian Welch’s Elvis Presley Blues in the middle of Wedding Song that makes me whoop with joy.  Having listened to the cast recording of the stage musical this week, it’s great to hear the Hadestown songs reduced to just Mitchell’s own voice and guitar again, an insight into their humble origins.  The chillingly prescient Why We Build the Wall, performed by the character of Hades in the musical, provides an opportunity for a dig at Donald Trump, to the audience’s delight: “This song long predates the guy who’s now trying to build the wall… but he happens to resemble the King of the Underworld!”  

Now You Know, from 2014 album Xoa, is a request from the audience, a song of longing and introspection that has us all singing along.  Another gem, The Pursewarden Affair, is “heavily influenced by folk music from your side of the pond,” and includes the brilliant line: “Have mercy on my heart / I don’t want to call it Art / Just because you nailed it to the wall / Maybe I’m a critic after all…”  

Mitchell alludes to a forthcoming new project called Bonny Light Horseman – a folk super-group she has formed with Josh Kaufman and Eric D. Johnson of the Fruitbats – and performs the traditional English song of the same name.  It’s one that I’m familiar with, but the sweetness of her vocals set against dissonant guitar chords gives the song an eerie melancholy. It’s rare to hear traditional songs interpreted in a way that sounds fresh and makes you listen to them anew, so I’m now eager to hear what the Bonny Light Horseman album holds in store.  

By the time she reaches the end of Changer, an early song that she says is “for all the unrequited lovers in the house”, everyone is sniffling and blinking back tears – it is heartbreakingly beautiful.  “Morning has stolen your shadow from me / But I hold its shape in my mind / It’s the shape of your back when you turned it on me / One last time.”  

Mitchell is joined on stage by her six-year-old daughter Ramona for the last song before the encore, and it is one of the few times where I’ve seen a musician invite their child up to perform and my toes haven’t been curling in embarrassment at the gimmicky, exploitative self-indulgence of it all.  Little Ramona begins an interpretive dance as her mother performs the song she wrote for her, Morning Glory, and the whole audience is instantly charmed.  Ramona is adorable, unselfconscious and unaffected, slowly twisting and twizzling around in movements that echo the song’s descriptions of the Morning Glory Flower: “with your tender arms outstretched…”  It is cute and funny, and both the moment and the song are sweet but not saccharine; a lovely way to round off the show.  

The final song of the night is Woody Guthrie’s Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos), and I get shivers at the relevance of the lyrics in light of recent events in the US: “Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted / Our work contract’s out and we have to move on; / Six hundred miles to that Mexican border, / They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”  Whether through her own lyrics or someone else’s, Anaïs Mitchell gets her emotional and political messages across.  One of the friends I came with tonight turns to me and declares that this is the best live concert she’s ever been to.  

Carsie Blanton

I have to give special mention to the sensational performance by tonight’s support act, Carsie Blanton, which knocked our socks off and which we talked about all the way home.  Dressed in a fifties sweater and wiggle skirt with bright lipstick and her neon pink hair in ringlets, she held us in the palm of her hand as she sang razor-sharp, funny, raunchy ditties about internet trolls (Fat & Happy), masturbation (Jacket) and Nazis (“you want a medal just for being a white boy – that ain’t the way we do it any more!”)  I’ve sinced listened to Carsie’s albums, and although the songwriting is still outrageously good, the energy of her live performance wasn’t quite captured in the studio.  Go and see this woman in the flesh and hear her for yourself – her brilliance will smack you ‘round the chops.  

Carsie is at The Brudenell again on Tuesday 27 August, supporting Gregory Alan Isakov.

All photographs by Stuart Clarke – stuartclarke.co.uk

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