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Anaïs was born and raised in the state of
Vermont, home of Phish, Ben & Jerry’s, and the Civil Union, where high
school kids drive fast on dirt roads, blasting Zeppelin, where rednecks and
hippies marry each other, where there are no billboards, anywhere. Anaïs
spent a happy, happy childhood on an Addison County sheep farm in the
eighties with assorted family members, animals, and guests, who taught her to
love music early on, especially the folk canon from “Rise Up Singing” and her
novelist dad’s record collection of folk revivalists and psychedelic rockers.
Listening to this 25-year-old
singer/songwriter perform her meticulously written songs, fervently singing
them in a distinctive, almost childlike voice, you’d think it was her life
mission to rouse the hearts and minds of her listeners with an acoustic
guitar. But Mitchell wasn’t always committed to the idea. “I used to tell
people I wanted to be a journalist. There is a lonely egotism and
self-composure to journalists. Not unlike artists, they’re always traveling,
always writing, loving their loneliness, feeling somehow that they have their
finger on the pulse – worshipping the truth and trying to render it legible.”
Despite her journalistic leanings, Mitchell started writing songs at age
seventeen, and at eighteen she moved to Boston, MA and
started playing them for whoever would listen, usually the seen-it-all
commuters waiting for trains at the Park St. T station or the types who
didn’t mind hanging out at 18+ open mikes. After a year of that, Anaïs
enrolled in a liberal arts school back in Vermont and did a great deal of performing during her school years,
which were punctuated by a remarkable amount of traveling. In a short period
of time, Anaïs made several trips to the Middle East, and also spent time in
Europe and Latin America, studying languages and world politics. This
stunning, troubadour-like experience seeped into her music, and she became
adept at fusing her passion for literature and journalism in her lyrics. Anaïs
is passionate about the music of her native land, from old-school country to
dustbowl labor ballads to rebel rock, however, the time she’s spent in Latin
America, Europe, and the Middle East has lent a worldly depth to her writing,
which she presents to her audience with a graceful presence of spirit.
With a clutch of quiet, ambitious songs in her arsenal, Mitchell recorded her
now out-of-print debut, The Song They Sang When Rome Fell (2002), in a single
afternoon in Austin, Texas. It was in Texas that Anais discovered the
Kerrville Folk Festival, which honored her with the prestigious New Folk
award in 2003. Soon thereafter, with the help of Michael Chorney and
Chicago-based Waterbug Records, Anaïs released her second album, Hymns For The
Exiled, in 2004. The stirring collection of guitar and voice cemented
Mitchell’s status as a folksinger to watch, and the record eventually reached
the ears of Ani DiFranco, a songwriter whose fusion of personal and political
themes was a formative influence on a teenaged Mitchell. After seeing a few
of Anaïs’ captivating concerts, DiFranco signed the artist to her label,
Righteous Babe Records.
“If you knew what Ani DiFranco meant to me as a young woman and a young
songwriter … well, I was simultaneously elated and in total disbelief,”
Mitchell told a Vermont reporter after joining the RBRrrmy. “It seemed too
good to be true.”
The same can be said about Mitchell’s Righteous Babe debut, which hits stores
February 13, 2007. During the recording process, Anaïs lived above the
studio, which was built into an old Vermont gristmill. She could wake up,
shake the sleep out of her eyes and record tracks in her pajamas, resulting
in a decidedly intimate listening experience. Spilling over with worldly
metaphors, intense emotions and unshakeable reverence to the art of song, The
Brightness shimmers with creative spark.
“And the big horns blowed and the
pianos played/And the music rose to the old man’s ears/I guess those were the
olden days/I guess those were the golden years,” she sings. This earnest
nostalgia trip says a lot about the kind of art that this Vermont native has
been creating since entering the underground folk scene in 2002. At a time
when the music industry is playing the role of the slickest of defense
attorneys, using flash and dazzle campaigns to distract us from the fact that
their clients are terrible, Mitchell is an artist who grew up on a sheep
farm. She makes small-sounding, big-thinking folk albums that play like a
front-porch serenade. If she feels in a bit of a time warp, you can’t blame
her.
To learn more about Anaïs and her music, visit her Web site
at www.anaismitchell.com
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