When Justin Vernon paid tribute to "the non-nominees who will never be [on this stage]" in his acceptance speech for the Best New Artist Grammy, it's possible one of the artists he had in mind was the ambitious, somewhat overlooked Vermont-born folk singer Anaïs Mitchell. Bon Iver has been covering a new tune of hers, "Coming Down", on their most recent tour, and Vernon sang on Mitchell's last release, 2010's Hadestown. That record was a 20-song, acoustic-driven opera telling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, with Vernon voicing the former, Mitchell the latter, and Ani DiFranco occasionally showing up to play Persephone. The whole thing often felt like an all-star folk book on tape, and it was as impressive and lovely and unapproachable as it sounds. In some ways, Mitchell's latest album, Young Man in America, is just as ambitious, but it's more intimate and accessible than its predecessor, focused on the textures of everyday life and the odd, stirring power of Mitchell's voice.
Though Young Man in America follows the titular character through some of its songs (including the terrific opening suite, in which the haunting, primal "Wilderland" moves seamlessly into the title track) it is less a concept record and more, in her words, "a meditation on a theme." And it's because of this approach that, although it's certainly got the recent recession and certain aspects of American history in mind, Young Man pulls off the difficult feat of feeling political without ever being didactic. Its songs instead focus on the repetitions of everyday labor (one of its narrators "Sew[s] a party dress/ In and out/ And in and out") and see in all types of work equal importance (a wife who's about to give birth tells her shepherd husband, "We both have laboring to do"). At first glance, the characters might seem remote from modern or everyday experience: a shepherd's wife who dies in childbirth, a seamstress, the occasional goddess. But in Mitchell's egalitarian eye, these characters are all animated with the same sort of life. The figures of farmers are chiseled into stone, and, in the lively strum of "Venus", a marble-carved goddess laughs, sings, and moans. Hers are the songs that make myths of men, and that make statues shimmy and shake.
Mitchell is a skilled storyteller; many of her songs move through absorbing narratives that pull the emotional rug out from under the listener at an expertly timed moment. The characters on Young Man in America all seem to begin relatively sure of themselves and end up sputtering, questioning, unraveling. "He Did" starts out as a rather sentimental song about the narrator's love for her father, but ends grappling with a series of personal quandaries in the wake of his death ("Who gave you your sorrow/...And an empty page to fill?"). Perhaps even more powerful, "Tailor" is told from the point of view of a woman who's always figured her character through the eyes of her man. "When he said/ That he liked my cut of hair/ I became a barber," she sings, and so on through "tailor," "sculptress," and finally "poet." When he leaves her midway through the song, she's left doubting her own identity, "Now that he's gone away/ There isn't anyone to say/ If I'm a diamond/ Or a dime-a-dozen." Mitchell gives voice this woman's question at the end of the song, with quiet pathos that could appear on the lips of almost any of Young Man's narrators: "Who am I/ Who am I?"
Mitchell has a sweet, squeaky bleat that's somewhere between Joanna Newsom and John Darnielle, and there will be those listeners who hear a verse or two of Young Man and dismiss her vocals as being precious or affected, but they'd be missing the point entirely. Mitchell's songs are never whimsical, sentimental, or light: Sex and death creep into her compositions as casually as they do real life. The words of these narrators gain a peculiar power when they're sung in a voice that sounds at times childlike and innocent, and her delivery gives these songs an emotional complexity that welcomes and even demands repeated listens. Same goes for the splendidly naturalistic arrangements, courtesy of producer Todd Sickafoose, which cast woodwinds as fluttering trees and crashing drums as characters' inner turmoil without ever feeling intrusive or overly literal. A few of the quieter songs like "Dyin' Day" and "Annmarie" pull from similar-sounding palettes, but the results are consistently immersive and rich.
Mitchell's father is a writer (that's an old picture of him on the cover), and one of Young Man's most riveting narratives, "Shepherd", is her adaptation of one of his stories. It's a fitting statement from a record focused on the classic American conflict between having reverence for lineage but craving independence and unpredictability. Like her characters, Mitchell possesses a restless spirit, one that pulls from her musical predecessors and contemporaries but continues with each release to develop a way of looking at the world that's all her own.
