I knew from the beginning that I wanted my friend Michael Chorney (formerly of the band Magic City) to help with the score, and he shaped it, so what would have been a folk song took on another color. I wrote all the songs on my guitar-lyric-heavy, with lots of fingerpicking. Eurydice sings, “I trembled when he laid me out,” so she does succumb and there is an element of death, but it was important that she made the decision-that it didn’t just happen to her. There’s something about mixed metaphors that allows you to stumble on unexpectedly rich ideas. Eurydice dies without agency, but in Hadestown she chooses the underworld and deals with the repercussions. In the original story, Orpheus’s wife, Eurydice, is bitten by a serpent and sent to the underworld, but in Hadestown she is tempted by the security Hades offers. That encouraged Hadestown in a futuristic U.S. In that depiction there’s one scene with a janitor sweeping up the identity papers of missing persons in a building that looks like a monolithic Death Star I was struck by the idea of a faceless bureaucracy. The beautiful film Black Orpheus, which retells the myth in Rio, where the underworld is a bureaucracy, also inspired me. When I started writing Hadestown, a couple of songs came out of me from nowhere and they pointed to this tale.
What inspired you to retell the myth in this setting? In your portrayal, the underworld is a walled-off, authoritarian realm that leaves those who dwell aboveground facing food scarcity and privation. Hadestown takes a strikingly fresh spin on the myth. Many artists have been intrigued by the Greek myth of Orpheus-the story of a powerful musician who moves inanimate objects with his songs. Bitch recently spoke with Mitchell about the uncanny insight of her lyrics and her resonant opera. The record follows in the tradition of political operas like Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Green Day’s American Idiot, but also includes a subplot of ill-fated romance similar to The Decemberists’ 2009 folk opera, The Hazards of Love. Prior to signing with Righteous Babe Records, the Vermont native traveled throughout the Middle East and Latin America, studying language and politics, and recorded The Song They Sang When Rome Fell (2002) and Hymns for the Exiled (2004).Īlongside Mitchell as Eurydice, Hadestown features Justin Vernon as Orpheus and DiFranco as Persephone, who runs a speakeasy and bootlegs remnants of the natural world. Hadestown is the brainchild of musician and writer Anaïs Mitchell, whose first release on Ani DiFranco’s label was The Brightness (2007). economy, but the false security of the underworld has a price-loss of contact with the corporeal earth. Based on the myth of Orpheus, the album re-creates the underworld as the final reprieve from a destitute U.S. “The enemy is poverty/ And the wall keeps out the enemy/ And we build the wall to keep us free/ That’s why we build a wall/ We build a wall to keep us free,” bellows the grave chorus of Hadestown, the postapocalyptic folk opera released by Righteous Babe Records in March 2009. This article was published in Old Issue #46 | Spring 2010 Subscribe »
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