Singer-songwriter Anais Mitchell is best known for her award-winning musical Hadestown, a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus’s journey into the underworld to rescue his lover, Eurydice. In researching this blog, I was shocked to learn that Neil Gaiman did not, in fact, invent this myth for his Sandman comics; next, we’ll learn that he didn’t invent the word “carnifex,” either!
Bringing Hadestown to the stage has been the focus of Anais’s professional life for the better of the last decade. Just before the pandemic shut things down, however, she released a joint project, Bonny Light Horseman, with Eric D. Johnson (of the Fruit Bats) and multi-instrumentalist/producer Josh Kaufman, which they briefly toured behind. The record consists of interpretations and reworkings of old folk ballads; this is familiar territory for Mitchell, who has also released an album of Child Ballads.
