#anais mitchell

Imagine being Anais Mitchell and writing a song about the rhetoric of fascism so incisive and prescient that 10 years later an actual fascist would use that exact rhetoric down to the highly-specific phrasing in his presidential campaign. But also it took 10 years for the project you wrote that song for to move from living room shows to concept album to theater workshop to off-Broadway to Broadway, and its Broadway debut ended up coinciding with said fascist's successful bid for the presidency, and now it looks like your song that you wrote in 2005 is a super unsubtle reference to that one particular and highly-topical politician.

The descent into the devastating and inescapable logic of “Why We Build the Wall” throughout the song will never not haunt me.

If Hadestown has a moral, she says, then it’s “you have to try, you have to have hope, not because success is a given – it’s not. Orpheus fails. We heroicise” – here she breaks off to apologise that jet lag has led to her making up words – “we heroicise Orpheus not because he succeeds but because he tries, and that endeavour alone is worthwhile. How to live, and not merely survive, is to believe things could change.”