Anaïs Mitchell: 'I think of Cork as a sort of cultural Mecca'
Anais Mitchell in Cork for Sounds From A Safe Harbour.
Folk singer Anaïs Mitchell brings her Bonny Light Horseman project to Cork’s Songs From A Safe Harbour festival on Friday, September 8.
A collaboration with Fruit Bats frontman Eric Johnson, and National collaborator Josh Kaufman, the group’s speciality in old-timey balladry, often of Celtic origin.
Here she talks about her belated passion for Taylor Swift, the legacy of her Hadestown Broadway musical and why Paul Brady was her “gateway” drug to traditional music.
I fucking love Cork. I’ve been a handful of times, played at Coughlan’s, St Luke’s, and I think I opened up for Josh Ritter at another spot. I’m a great fan of Enda Walsh’s plays and Mick Flannery’s songs, both of whom I associate with Cork. Last time I played in Cork someone gifted me A Ghost In The Throat by another local, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and I absolutely lapped it up, so all of this conspires to make me think of Cork as a sort of... cultural Mecca.
Our coming to Sounds From A Safe Harbour is a bit of a full-circle event! Our first show ever was at Eaux Claires fest in Wisconsin – Justin [Vernon of Bon Iver] and the Dessners offered us a set at the fest before we even had a band name, let alone a record! The artists’ residency in Berlin was also sponsored by those same folks - 37d03d - “PEOPLE”. And the common denominator here is Mary Hickson, who organised all three of those events.
I was sort of a late-blooming trad folkie, like I didn’t fall in till my late twenties, but once I did I was like Alice in the rabbit-hole, I fell and fell. The greats for me have been Martin Carthy, Nic Jones, and the early Paul Brady records. And I’m just realising that Paul Brady was absolutely a gateway drug for me. I was playing a few shows in Ireland, and we had one of those nights where the gig finished and then there was a lock-in at the pub, and then when we had to leave the pub we all went to the band flat, and in the wee hours of the morning someone pulled out their phone and showed me Paul Brady singing ‘Arthur MacBride’ on a television show in the 1970s, and it absolutely changed the course of my life.
I think there’s something about singing an old song in a new way, that connects us to the ancestors, and whoever’s coming next, in a way that feels pretty spiritual. Like, here we are— falling in love, getting brokenhearted, dealing with desire, loss, politics, family— and this happened hundreds of years ago, and people sang about it then, and it will happen hundreds of years from now, too. It’s a way of locating ourselves and our “turn at the wheel”.
I love that neither Taylor Swift nor Aaron Dessner [who co-wrote and produced most of Folklore] felt constrained by some imaginary "genre border" between them. Life’s too short for that territorial shit!
I have to admit that although I’d always admired Taylor’s role as cultural girlboss, I never listened that carefully until suddenly all my friends were on her record! (Josh plays some guitar, JT plays some drums, etc.). And the biggest surprise is that her latest record— Midnights— is now a staple in our house, because both me and my 10-year-old daughter love it. So now I’m in.
And I’d say this— however you respond or don’t respond to Taylor Swift’s music, you have to admire her extraordinary creative prolificness, adventurousness, stamina, and grace under the pressure of the public eye. There’s absolutely no one like her.
I can honestly say I feel nothing but gratitude, now, for what that piece became, in my own life and in the lives of others. There were times, in the middle of rewriting it for the umpteenth time, when I worried that it had taken over my life to an extent that I wouldn’t be able to “come back” from. But I feel so glad and lucky to be making regular old records again, reconnecting with the music world. And I’m still awestruck by the theatre- what is possible on the theatrical stage- I hope to return to that world as well someday.
I met Josh when we were both living in Brooklyn, around 2017. I’d admired his guitar playing for some time and then we were put together by the Brassland label to make a one-off track for Amazon with our friend Kate Stables [of This Is The Kit]. We discovered we had a mutual love of traditional songs, especially stuff from across the pond, and we started messing around with some songs together.
Josh and Eric are friends since forever, and I had just discovered and fallen in love with Bats when Josh was passing through Los Angeles on tour and said, “I’m having dinner with my friend Eric, I think he might be perfect for our project”. It was all sort of random and charmed but with distance, I can see how it was meant to be, we were all just deeply drawn to this material in different ways and for different reasons.
Vermont is an anomaly. Very liberal, true, it’s the home of Bernie Sanders. A lot of left-leaning hippies, my parents included, moved here in the 1970s as part of the ‘back to the land’ movement. They founded food coops, yoga studios, had children... There are also a lot of old-school conservatives here, old farm families, but they tend not to go in for Trumpism.
It’s a state that really values neighbourliness, people often say that whatever your political ideology, if the roads get slippery in winter and your car ends up in a ditch, your neighbour will pull you out. There are in-person town meetings, and everything is smaller in scale— maybe that tends to keep things more humane. Our Governor Phil Scott is the only Republican I ever voted for, a strong leader who often crosses political lines and has been outspoken against Trump from day one.
- Anais Mitchell, along with her band Bonny Light Horseman, will perform two Irish shows with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and special guests – Friday, September 8, at Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival in Cork; and Thurs, September 14, at the National Concert Hall. See soundsfromasafeharbour.com
