Scruffy, low-key charm, extraordinary songs and mesmerising singing
Anaïs Mitchell
Roundhouse, London NW1 ★★★★★
Anaïs Mitchell is something special, and it is gratifying to see the world waking up to her talent. The 38-year-old American folk singer-songwriter seemed taken aback by the scale of the venue when blinking out at The Roundhouse to mutter, “there’s so many of you and you go all the way around. It’s disconcerting!” She acknowledged those at the periphery of the circular auditorium. “Hi out there. Sorry if I’m not full frontal.” Then she laughed with an endearingly nervous charm. “That’s not quite what I meant.”
The venue’s annual In the Round concert series puts performers right into the middle of this Victorian railway turntable building, creating an intimate atmosphere well suited to Mitchell’s scruffy, low-key charm. She has come up through the cosy folk circuit, but last year Hadestown, her 2006 folk opera, became a belated Broadway sensation. It has put a deserving spotlight on an artist whose songcraft bears comparison with the sophisticated lyrical and jazzily musical work of Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, while retaining roots in rustic, acoustic Americana.
In a short dress and boots, with untidy blonde dyed hair, bright red lipstick and a big anchor tattoo on her left shoulder, Mitchell looked more like a vintage New York punk than a delicate folkie – Courtney Love channelling Rickie Lee Jones. There was a very conspicuous bump propping up her semi-acoustic guitar. “I am seven months pregnant,” she announced. “It feels pretty obvious to me but a lot of people are shy and don’t want to assume. At this point, you can’t really say anything to a pregnant woman until she’s crowning: ‘Oh, you’re pregnant!’”
The remark was typical of her between-song patter; chatty and funny with the off-the-wall delivery of a kooky stand-up.
Her songs are extraordinary, with flowing melodies and vivid lyrics, full of compelling narrative drive and surprising imagery, performed with a dreamy intensity.
A dramatic conjoining of Wilderland and Young Man in America proved scintillating, conjuring bruised intimate epics of a bewildered American spirit. “Come out like a cannonball / Come of age with alcohol / Raven in a field of rye / With a black and roving eye / Ravenous, ravenous / What you’ve got is not enough…”
Mitchell’s four-piece band shifted sinuously through the gears from ethereal atmospherics to full-blooded drama. Featuring Josh Kaufman, the veteran multi-instrumentalist, and Eric D Johnson, the rock Americana singer (of the Fruit Bats), they have been working with Mitchell as a kind of alternative folk supergroup, Bonny Light Horseman, with a self-titled debut album out this week.
It was all very casual and friendly yet elevated to the highest realm by the exceptionally refined musicianship, utterly mesmerising singing and Mitchell’s songwriting brilliance, at last being accorded the attention she deserves.