When her A mericana musical, Hadestown, exploded on Broadway, songwriting took a back row seat. Now ANAÏS MITCHELL is re-finding her muse, her childhood self, and a bagful of tunes in backwoods Vermont. “It’s not that cool,” she tells GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN, “but I don’t have the energy to be cool any more.”

ANAÏS MITCHELL KNEW BETTER THAN TO TAKE another job.

It was June 2020, three months since she and her husband Noah had fled New York for the sheep farm where she grew up in middle Vermont, five hours due north. A week after the move, she had given birth to their second daughter, Rosetta. So when the invitation arrived to join a long-distance consortium of songwriters who penned and posted a song a day, she already knew she was too busy. But she also somehow knew she had to say yes.

“That’s not how I roll –I take years to write,” exclaims Mitchell. “But as someone who second-guesses and overthinks things, I found it wildly healing. The exercise of having to say ‘Yes’ to whatever idea you have and getting out of the way was incredible.”

Photography by JAY SANSONE

It was high time Mitchell got out of her own way. Nearly a decade had passed since she’d released her last solo album, 2012’s Young Man In America. Since then, her career had moved in an entirely different direction. More than 10 years in development, her Americana musical Hadestown, a poignant rendering of the doomed mythological romance of Orpheus and Eur ydice, hit Broadway in 2019. It earned a staggering eight Tonys and a Grammy, and Time magazine proclaimed Mitchell one of 2020’s 100 most influential people.

The dizzying success and schedule made her question if she’d ever make another singer-songwriter record, despite her five solo LPs, membership of folk trio Bonny Light Horseman and recent contributions to Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner’s Big Red Machine collective. “If I tried to write another song,” she says, “I felt like I was cheating on Hadestown.”