‘Hadestown’ is coming to Philly, and creator Anaïs Mitchell has released her most personal album yet

Anaïs Mitchell’s new album is the first collection of original songs she’s released under her own name in 10 years.

But cut the Vermont songwriter some slack: She’s been kind of busy, for the last decade and a half or so.

Mitchell is the creator of Hadestown, the Broadway musical for which she wrote the music, lyrics, and book, with the first songs dating back as far as 2006.

The recasting of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice — and Hades and Persephone, King and Queen of the Underworld — was a community theater production in Vermont in 2006, and a Mitchell concept album in 2010.

Mitchell teamed with director Rachel Chavkin in 2012, and there were productions in Edmonton, Alberta, and London before Hadestown finally opened on Broadway in 2019. That year, the show won eight Tony Awards, including best musical and a best score award for Mitchell.

Now, Hadestown is arriving in Philadelphia. The North American touring production opens at the Academy of Music on Feb. 9 and runs through Feb. 20.

And while Hadestown rolls on, Mitchell is on the road herself, touring behind her new 10-song collection Anais Mitchell. It’s the acclaimed singer’s seventh album, but first to be self-titled, and most autobiographical.

“It’s kind of funny to do it in the middle of your career, because obviously, it’s not my debut,” says Mitchell, 40. “But when I looked at the songs that I was writing in the summer and fall of 2020, it was a whole batch where were I was the speaker, and all the stories were my own.

“And I’d actually never done that. Hadestown is a big exercise is dressing up in other characters and clothes. But this one is just really personal. It’s very heart-on-the-sleeve. So it felt appropriate to self-title it.”

Mitchell spoke from a van on the way to Iowa City, Iowa, to open a tour that starts on Friday and will bring her to the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton on Feb. 12.

The opening act is Bonny Light Horseman, whose members include Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman, who produced Anais Mitchell. The group, which reworked traditional folk songs on a 2020 self-titled release, has a new album of original material due later this year. (Johnson and Kaufman then play in Mitchell’s band, backing her during her headline set.)

Among the travelers in the van was Rosetta — Mitchell’s toddler daughter with husband, Noah Hahn — who is named after Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the rock and roll pioneer buried in Northwood Cemetery in Philadelphia.

In early March 2020, when Mitchell, who also has an 8-year-old daughter named Ramona, was eight months pregnant with Rosetta, she appeared with the Broadway cast of Hadestown on NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert.

The cast performed highlights from the show, including “Why We Build the Wall,” sung by Hades, played by Patrick Page in the original Broadway production and Kevyn Morrow in the touring ensemble.

When Hadestown opened on Broadway, “The Wall,” about constructing an edifice to protect residents of the industrial Underworld from poor people (“The enemy is poverty,” Hades sings), was interpreted as being about former President Donald Trump’s proposed barrier between the United States and Mexico.

But Mitchell actually wrote the song in 2006. “I was thinking about climate change,” Mitchell recalls. “What happens if much of the world becomes uninhabitable, and people who are leaving those places are knocking at the door of places of relative wealth and security?”

Days after the Tiny Desk performance, the pandemic began to rage. Mitchell and Hahn decided to leave Brooklyn and moved to Bristol, Vt., where Mitchell grew up.

Her daughter was born in her parents’ farmhouse, built in the 1970s on land her father bought with earnings from selling the film rights to a novel called Thumb Tripping that he wrote as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College in Delaware County.

Mitchell and her family will soon move in to the house where her grandparents lived when she was a child, also on the property.

“I literally think of this house as my happy place,” she says, recalling “the freedom of your grandparents to spoil you.”

Her parents named her after writer Anaïs Nin and had a record collection full of “wordy wordsmith songwriters” like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.

“The song ‘Revenant’ on this album is really a lot of sense memories from my childhood that were reawakened by being in the house. I found my old journals, and my grandma’s letters to me, and a lock of my own hair as a kid,” Mitchell says.

Her return home brought Anaïs Mitchell to life. The album is the flip side of the music of Hadestown, which is often roaring, powered by blues, gospel, and New Orleans swagger.

Anaïs Mitchell is quieter with strings and flutes arranged by Nico Muhly, with simpler songs with hidden depths like the mournful “On Your Way (Felix Song)” and “Little Big Girl.”

“There was a little bit of fear of navel gazing,” she says. Even on solo albums like 2013′s Young Man in America, Mitchell has shied away from autobiography. “It’s almost like ‘confessional’ is a dirty word. But that’s actually what this is. And it’s funny, because I’m not 25. It’s not an album about my love life, or getting heartbroken. It’s about being the age I am now.”

Mitchell was involved with casting decisions of the touring Hadestown. She points to Kimberly Marable as Persephone, an understudy on Broadway, as a standout in the production coming to Philly.

She saw the show in Washington and says “it’s totally different, and I think that’s a good thing.”

Liam Robinson, the pianist who’s the show’s musical director and vocal arranger, agrees. “We didn’t want to copycat with the casting. Because it’s built around a myth, there’s a lot of room for actors to bring themselves to it in an expansive way.”

One example, says Robinson, is the role of the messenger god Hermes, played on Broadway by Tony winner André De Shields, 74, who starred in The Wiz in the 1970s. In Philly, the role will be played by Levi Kreis, 40, who starred as Jerry Lee Lewis in The Million Dollar Quartet. “So he brings a much different flavor to it,” says Robinson.

Mitchell says shaping Hadestown spoke “to the powers of myths in general. It’s like the Michelangelo thing of the sculpture in the stone. You’re chipping away, and there’s always more to reveal.”

Writing for theater “is almost like wearing a mask: You can express emotions, and dance a little wilder,” she says. “Where I want to live is the intersection of what feels like is really honest, and also kind of mythic. So it feels universal, and taps into something bigger than myself.”

Mitchell says that she never could have imagined Hadestown’s success, but working on it “always felt magical.”

Since she returned to Vermont, her whole Hadestown adventure has come to seem “like a dream,” and she’s started to think of it as “like an animal with a life of its own.”

But while Mitchell has enjoyed creating Anaïs Mitchell, she’s open to revisiting Broadway.

When she went back to New York when Hadestown reopened in September, “I was just so overwhelmed by this creature that a Broadway show is,” she says.

“Just seeing the actors, the staging, the choreography, the whole thing. I thought:, ‘Oh my God, how could I not do this again?’ I love living in this world right now, but I think if the right story comes around, I’ll go back into that world.”