Hadestown sees Anaïs Mitchell joined by a host of guest contributors including Ani Di Franco, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), The Haden Triplets, Greg Brown and Ben Knox Miller of the Low Anthem. Based upon the ancient Greek myth of the poet Orpheus and his doomed quest to rescue his wife Eurydice from the underworld, Hadestown evokes an American depression-era past, the global financial troubles leading into 2010 (though it was written before the stock market collapse), and a post-apocalyptic future.

Anaïs, who sings the part of Eurydice, the character whose (metaphoric) death propels Orpheus into Hadestown is joined by a veritable Who’s Who of modern indie folk and rock on the release. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver plays Orpheus; Greg Brown is Hades, Lord of the Underworld (”king of the kingdom of dirt”); Ani DiFranco plays Hades’ strong-willed, subversive wife, Persephone; the Haden Triplets (Petra, Rachel, and Tanya) are the Greek chorus - like Fates and Ben Knox Miller of The Low Anthem is the messenger Hermes. Together, they create a world where people hide behind walls in a misguided attempt to preserve their “freedom” and protect their riches.

It’s not often that a record comes along which combines everything I love about music. HADESTOWN is one such rarity. There’s wonderful performances and production; melodic, meaningful songs; diversity of pace, mood and sound - in short, a musical feast which is a strong contender for my top album of 2010. So rather than me try to describe it to you in detail, I’ll let it’s author Anaïs Mitchell give you the full story.

When I first started writing the songs for Hadestown I had a few friends in mind to sing the parts, mostly singers from different bands around Vermont, and they ended up being the original cast. We rehearsed in a frenzy in the evenings during what I think was a two-week period. Our rehearsal space, and the first place we mounted the show, was the old labor hall in Barre, Vt., a beautiful old historical building where a lot of union organizing went on in the thirties. There was so much about those first shows that was flawed (at least writing-wise, on my end, in my own opinion) but they were some of the most magical moments of my creative life so far. Ben Matchstick created a whole world, a whole visual vocabulary for the show, in just a couple weeks. He’s a real magician, an eleventh-hour genius; he has the ability to make something out of nothing - no budget, no time, a rabbit from a hat. Then, of course, the collaboration with Michael Chorney, who wrote some of the most haunting and beautiful arrangements I’ve ever heard on any songs. One crazy thing about Michael is he doesn’t use any composing software, and he doesn’t play the arrangements on a keyboard as he writes them; he really just hears them in his head and writes them down with a pencil on staff paper - so a lot of the music he hadn’t actually heard out loud until the band got together a few days before the show! The band was Michael’s project at the time, Magic City; they had started out as a Sun Ra tribute band but were quickly evolving into something bigger. There was really a sense from the beginning of the collaboration that the Hadestown show had three voices in it: my songwriting voice, Ben’s visual/theatrical voice, and Michael’s orchestral voice. It was a sum-greater-than-the-parts kind of thing.

After the second run, there were again a lot of changes I wanted to make. I wanted to go a step further toward fully-realized characters, and a step backward toward the simplicity of the story in the very first show we did. I wanted to let go of some stuff that had never really sat right with me as a lyricist. We talked briefly about trying to mount another run the following year but the consensus seemed to be that to finish the songs, the song-cycle, should be the priority before staging again, and what better motivation to do that than booking studio time to commit the stuff to tape forever and ever? I worked real hard in advance of the recording but it was not as easy as I’d thought it might be to get things to a finished place. It felt a little like doing a crossword puzzle where there’s just a few squares missing, and it can only be one very specific thing. That is, we’d created a world, and now I had to be consistent within it, lyric-wise, music-wise. “Wedding Song,” “Flowers (Eurydice’s Song),” “Nothing Changes,” and “I Raise My Cup” were all new additions. “Wait,” “If It’s True,” and the two “Epics” also underwent major changes. I cut a song that had had a gorgeous score, and one that people were sorry to see let go. It was pretty tough!

But there was a crazy motivating factor, and that was, one by one these guest singers were getting on board. Ani DiFranco was the first, and I owe much of the momentum of the recording to her faith and belief in the project. I don’t think she’d even heard the Persephone songs when she said she’d sing them. That’s brave! Then there was Greg Brown: I’d imagined him singing the Hades part for a long time but still whenever I hear his voice coming in on “Hey, Little Songbird” I laugh for joy. His voice is subterranean, it has strange overtones, I feel it in my belly almost before my ears. He and Ani were both early songwriting heroes of mine. Then there’s Justin Vernon: That was kind of a cosmic casting situation. Justin and his manager reached out of the blue and asked if I wanted to open the Bon Iver tour of Europe. They’d never met me; they had just heard my record once and liked it, and they thought, Let’s have her open the tour! It’s unthinkable, really. The very first night of the tour, when I heard Justin sing “Stacks” in Newcastle in the UK, my heart exploded; I thought, “He HAS to be Orpheus.” I wrote my manager Slim [Moon] and Todd [Sickafoose] the producer: “He is the Orpheus of the century!” I loved the idea that Orpheus, as a supernatural figure, could sing with many voices at the same time. But I had to have a stern little talk with myself that night; I was like, “This guy doesn’t even know you, and he’s already doing you a huge favor having you on the tour; you can’t ask him right away, you might weird him out, wait till the end of the tour and then see if it’s the right thing to ask him…” But the second night of the tour we were on a ferryboat from Scotland to Norway and I’d had a couple glasses of wine and I couldn’t bear it any longer - I just blurted it all out in a rush: the opera, the record, will you please please please be Orpheus? and Justin just said, “yes.”