Anaïs Mitchell: The Brightness

ANAÏS MITCHELL: THE BRIGHTNESS (2007)

1) Your Fonder Heart; 2) Of A Friday Night; 3) Namesake; 4) Shenandoah; 5) Changer; 6) Song Of The Magi; 7) Santa Fe Dream; 8) Hobo's Lullaby; 9) Old Fashioned Hat; 10) Hades & Persephone; 11) Out Of Pawn.

Perhaps Hymns For The Exiled did not qualify as a neo-folk masterpiece, but its open outrage at the contemporary state of affairs in the artist's home country did attract the attention of Ani Di­Franco, one of the toughest human right warriors alive in the female domain, and this not only got Mitchell on Ani's Righteous Babe Records, but also helped her get some much-needed promotion: from this point on, critical reviews of her albums gradually become more numerous, and since her kind of art is particularly attractive to critics (unusual voice + intelligent lyrics + acoustic guitars = near-instant win), this means that somewhere in between 2004 and 2007, and particularly with the release of her first album on RBR, Anaïs Mitchell became a local celebrity.

Nevertheless, The Brightness is still a very low-key affair. Acoustic guitar, piano, and some violas and cellos from time to time is all you hear; and furthermore, ironically, The Brightness is much, much less politically charged than its predecessor. Much of it is about Mitchell herself, and some of it is just a series of musical-lyrical vignettes that may be interpreted any way you like. If we are to describe her current sound in «synthetic» terms, it would probably be a combination of Woody Guthrie / early Dylan (in terms of her melodic content; see especially ʽHobo's Lullabyʼ, or that last song which begins with a direct quotation from Bob's ʽSong To Woodyʼ), Leonard Cohen (in terms of her attempting to convey some moral or some mystery by means of some unexpected lyrical parable), and, well, the usual Bush/Amos/Newsom conglomerate — in terms of her being a woman who sings in a strange voice, the «innocent girl soul stuck in an experi­enced woman body».

Not that it hadn't been that way before, but it seems as if The Brightness is her first album on which the style has matured, consolidated, and even fossilized. She is not straining too hard to make a social statement, but neither does she look like a person desperately searching for some­thing. Most of the songs either give advice ("come out, come on, come outside" — the first line of the opening song) or make observations, and a few songs lightly wax nostalgic over the good old days (ʽOf A Friday Nightʼ). There is very little to get irritated about, and even less to get ex­cited about; the question is one of possibly acknowledging and enjoying the record's small and subtle charms, or ignoring and rejecting them altogether.

I will mention a few examples whose subtlety I personally found quite pleasant. ʽOf A Friday Nightʼ (I can very easily picture this one as sung by Joni Mitchell and placed somewhere at the beginning of Blue or her other pre-jazz period records) harbors a cool poetic idea and expresses it with gusto — the climactic end of the song is basically a hopeless plea for the nameless "old poet" to come back so that the protagonist could take on the shapes of all his former objects of description and inspiration ("I'll be a good time gambler, I'll be a restless wife..."); if we take this analysis very very far, we might end up stating that ʽOf A Friday Nightʼ is nothing less than a curtain call on Old World Artistry (but we will not take it that far).

Another definite highlight is ʽHades & Persephoneʼ (apparently, Mitchell thought so herself, or else she wouldn't base her entire next record around it): she uses the Orpheus myth here as a pre­text for having the two protagonists of the song discuss the meaning of life (one of the conclu­sions they reach is that "the earth is a bird on a spit in the sky"; be warned that this is about as deep as Mitchell's philosophy goes, but then, she is really an artist, not a philosopher, so perhaps it'll do), and there is something nasty, urgent, and disturbing in each of her "how long, how long, how long?"'s that Hades and Persephone trade between each other.

Human right activists will gladly welcome ʽSong Of The Magiʼ, which begins innocently enough as a sad folk retelling of the Bethlehem story, but then, as a morose cello joins the acoustic guitar, suddenly makes a transition to the current state of Israel ("a child is born in Bethlehem... born in a cattle pen... born on the killing floor... waiting for the war... your home is a checkpoint now", etc. etc.). The smooth linkage of Christmas joys with Near Eastern agony is an idea that might work well on paper; unfortunately, sound-wise the song is way too toothless to make much of an im­pression, and I wouldn't probably even have mentioned it if I did not look closely at the printed lyrics at one point.

And that is the continuing trouble: most of these songs are still more interesting for their words than for their melodies. From that point of view, the smooth alliance between Mitchell and Ani DiFranco, one of the world's most ardent warriors but also most mediocre songwriters, is troub­ling: something like ʽNamesakeʼ, with its addition of lite jazz brass, sounds almost exactly like Ani's band at one of their less inspired sessions (and most of her band's sessions sound pretty uninspired to me). Also troubling are such discoveries as the main acoustic melody of ʽSanta Fe Dreamʼ, doubled by the vocals, essentially being a slight variation on Pink Floyd's ʽWish You Were Hereʼ — which is probably why the song made me pay attention, yet never really lived up to that opening flourish of "if it should happen...".

I guess, in the end, the main shortcoming of The Brightness, which it admittedly shares with hundreds of other decent-but-mediocre albums, is that it sounds too intellectualized to elicit some sharp emotional response, but not enough intellectualized to reveal any startling surprises or make you reconsider some of life's truths and lies. But if you set your expectations to nil, then The Brightness will just be a cool old statement of happiness and sorrow from the bright young girl next door. Like, at the end she will give her humble regards to post-Katrina New Orleans, which is just... nice. Even if she has to borrow a bit from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan to do it, for no apparent reason. Then again, maybe it is precisely the things that she does for no apparent reason that make this record more tolerable and appreciable than it could be otherwise.