Anaïs Mitchell: 'I have a sense of Cork as an alive, creative city'

The American singer is back touring following her Broadway success, and takes in two Irish dates

Wed, 24 Aug, 2022 - 22:05

Ed Power

Anaïs Mitchell has a far more intimate knowledge of Cork than the average touring American musician. She’s played the city previously and has worked with Mary Hickson, the creative producer who has a long-standing artistic connection to Bryce Dessner of The National and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon (and who programmes Cork’s Songs From A Safe Harbour festival).

“I am a huge Enda Walsh fan," says Mitchell of the Irish playwright who made his breakthrough with Disco Pigs, set in Cork. "I discovered Enda because when I was studying musicals to work on Hadestown [her hugely-successful musical]. I went to see Once on Broadway. I loved the book of that musical that he wrote. I thought it was such a brilliant adaptation. The movie was great. But the musical was this whole other animal that he beautifully brought to life.

"I have a love of Cork because of Enda and because of Mary and because of [intimate venue] Coughlan’s where I played one time. I have a genuine sense of Cork as an alive, creative city.”

In March 2020, when the pandemic made landfall in New York, Mitchell packed everything that mattered to her and drove north. She was nine months pregnant and returning, with her husband and her first child, to her family home in rural Vermont.

Their route out of the city crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. On her recent self-titled album, she recalls that moment: “Over Brooklyn Bridge/Through the arches/Over Brooklyn Bridge/You and me in the darkness.”

“I think the whole record is on the nose in a way," she says, in advance of her upcoming gigs in Cork and Dublin. "There’s a way where it sort of felt the job with these songs was to see how honest they can be. How heart-on-sleeve I could be, even if it wasn’t cool.

“And Brooklyn Bridge is one of the songs. I was living in New York. There is a sort of glorification of Brooklyn in the arts. I didn’t want to be part of that. I tried and tried to find another line. Did it have to be 'Brooklyn Bridge'? Nothing sounded that good. It wasn’t until I left the city that it felt like, ‘oh I do feel this way. I feel romantic about Brooklyn and the city’. I felt more able to give over to it, once I wasn’t living there.”

'Anaïs Mitchell' is the songwriter’s eighth album and her first in eight years. It is a moving celebration of home and belonging – and of reconciling your past and present self. There are songs about high school and old boyfriends – but also about where she is now in her life, having turned 40 and settled with her family in the rural community where she grew up.

“I left New York unexpectedly because of the pandemic," she says. "I was about to have my second baby. We made a last-minute decision. Fled. Had the baby one week later. We’re in this rural spot, where my parents live and my brother’s family live."

For Mitchell, the new location was a sort of return to her childhood.

"It was that thing of where you return to the place where you’re from and you’re a different person. And you are continually reminded of that fact. You run into your ninth-grade teacher and you’re like, I’m a grown-up now. It’s a different era. That is when I started to write these new songs. There was a mystery with them."

Mitchell’s music has the quality of a secret shared among friends. Her voice flutters from sweet to conspiratorial and on the new album, her lyrics traverse every emotion: heartache, regret, hope, joy, sadness.

As was the intention of an artist who was returning to songwriting after dedicating years to the Broadway show that, in 2019, won eight Tony Awards. It could all make for some special Irish performances.