I am obsessed with this new album.
I’ve had my history of album obsession, starting with
wonderfully disgraceful pop music: Donna Summer’s Bad Girl and the soundtrack to Grease
during my tween years (though nobody had ever heard of tweens back when I was
one). My guy friends apparently all spun Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while I belted out Natalie Cole’s Unforgettable until I found the real
thing, Ella Fitzgerald’s The Best of
Songbooks (I have the complete songbooks now, thank you God!). Sheryl Crow’s
eponymous second album echoed late in the empty office hallways during the
years I worked on my tenure file, with me singing along way too loud. And there
were the Michelle Shocked Arkansas
Traveler days, and the days I played nothing but Atlanta Rhythm Section’s Champagne Jam, and She & Him Volume 2, or the Dixie Chicks’ Fly.
Suzanne Vega’s Retrospective
haunted me during my divorce; Jack Johnson’s In Between Dreams became my anthem for a new and more complicated
life, and my second husband and I debated over “Better Together” for our
wedding dance before settling on Ella Fitzgerald’s “I Could Write a Book.” We
listened in bed to Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong
over and over again. I only need to hear the first chords of a song from one of
those albums to be back for a moment in that time, remembering working too late
too many nights, remembering that dark Christmas Day that I realized I would be
divorced soon, remembering that later giddy Christmas when my old friend
courted me with chocolate and roses and music.
A song is a fun little fling, but an album is a full-fledged
love affair. I’ve flirted with individual songs like Pink Martini’s “Hang on
Little Tomato” and Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You into the Dark.” And
compilations! and playlists! I have a not-so-secret and pretty seriously
bourgeois fondness for compilation cds from Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn
and Starbucks. I love playlists and make one every Valentine’s Day for my
husband, and I add every year to my famous Halloween party playlist, spreading
songs around me like photos for an album and choosing only the most wonderful.
Still, a playlist isn’t an album and never will be, and I can love a song
without giving it my heart.
People of my generation (oh my God! I’m old!) have a special
relationship with albums, one I sometimes think my children and my students can’t
fully understand, growing up as they have in the perpetual
earbuds-iPod-mp3-Pandora-Spotify world. Just like most of my students have
never read a collection of poems written by a single author, they seem to have
a different experience of music, one that seems more scattershot to me, but
also somehow more fundamental—they live their lives immersed in an perpetual
stream, eddying from old favorites to new music in way I can barely begin to
imagine.
I’ve ventured into that brave new world and love it too—but
the album! especially vinyl! turning the album to the B side, the hiss of my
not-very-good record player still a part of my memory of those old songs. The
album, the perfect whole, each song a beat in the heartbeat of the whole.
My husband is interested in the music in music; I’m
interested in the words. Once as we listened to the Beach Boy’s “Good
Vibrations,” Hayes said “Listen to that cello, how it comes out in the mix
towards the end,” and I said in surprise and without thinking, “Are there
instruments in this song?” I hear the music too, of course, but when an album
rockets to the top of my personal charts, I learn the lyrics first and fast. I
can’t sing—though of course that never stopped me—but if I can’t sing along
with an album even in my own limping way, if the lead is too deep or too high,
I’ll never love that album quite the same way. Ibrahim Ferrer’s Mi Sueño is so lovely, but I’ve
forgotten so much of my Spanish now that the best I can do is hum along, and so
that album has never risen to the true heights of cult following for me.
Hadestown, though.
A friend who knows I love poetry and music and literature
and mythology sent me a link to Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown—listen, he
said, to this, this folk opera, this retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice
myth. And I listened, and listened, and have listened since August to Orpheus’s
multivoiced epic desire, to Eurydice’s sweet longing, to Hades’s deep-throated
swagger, to Persephone’s earthy jazz, to Hermes’s scratchy hobo tenor, to the
Fates' bright harmonic cynicism—to this myth of the grand but always already
doomed quest to bring back love from the dead.
The 2010 album was presciently set in darkness and poverty,
the songs written well before the recent US economic slump, and in that setting we
see the first and really most substantial departure from the myth. Eurydice
is blameless in the classic tale, dying from a snakebite on her wedding day to
Orpheus. In Hadestown, though,
Eurydice is a woman deeply conscious of the precariousness of her situation,
and that anxiety becomes her downfall. In the first piece in the album, “Wedding
Song,” she asks Orpheus repeatedly how he will provide for their wedding and
their marriage, “Times being what they are / Hard and getting harder all the
time.” Orpheus blithely assures her that the river will provide gold for the
wedding rings, the trees the food for the wedding table, the birds the feathers
for the wedding bed, but Eurydice’s questioning foreshadows her fall into
Hadestown.
Eurydice’s yearning for both love and safety resonate
profoundly throughout this album, and her unease about her possible life with
Orpheus echoes even in her declarations of love for the poet. She is fascinated
with Hadestown and its overlord, a world so beguiling and flush that she sees
only “Everybody sipping ambrosia wine.” While Orpheus and Hermes warn her that “Mister
Hades is a mean old boss,” she sees only the “goldmine” that is Hadestown, not
the “graveyard” they try to show her. She is tempted by the prosperity of
Hadestown, ending the song “Way Down Hadestown” with her frank desire to be
secure:
Mr. Hades is a mighty king
Must be making some mighty big
deals
Seems like he owns everything
Kind of makes you wonder how it
feels
The plaintive tone of her song here makes it hard to blame
her for what we know already will be her seduction by Hades. In one of his most
important songs, “Hey, Little Songbird,” Hades plays expertly on Eurydice’s
uncertainly and need; such a “pity for one so pretty and young,” but “nobody
sings on empty,” he assures her. She wavers, wanting what we all want, “a nice
soft place to land,” and calls out a lament to Orpheus, whom she clearly loves.
But Orpheus is nowhere in evidence as Hades draws a grim portrait of her life
with her artist husband:
Hey, little songbird, let me guess
He’s some kind of poet—and he’s
penniless
Give him your hand, he’ll give you
his hand-to-mouth
He’ll write you a poem when the
power’s out
Hey, why not fly south for the
winter?
And so Erydice slips into the afterlife in “Gone, I’m Gone,”
giving Orpheus her heart but telling him “It’s my gut I can’t ignore / Orpheus,
I’m hungry.” This grim vision of the life of the artist is something about this
album I find compelling—I gotta say, poets don’t get much respect or cash in
this world, and nobody knows that better than Hades.
But what I love most about this album is the profound way
Mitchell retells and transforms the story, honoring it and making it live
again. I’ve been working for years now on a collection of poems imaging the
life of a goddess in contemporary American, and translating a myth is hard work—or
at least I have found it very hard. Fascinating, compelling, rewarding—but
really damn hard. I adore Mitchell’s Persephone—her loveliness, her confidence,
how smoothly she moves between the ancient myth and today’s world, as a goddess
should. In her largest moment in the album, “Our Lady of the Underground,”
Persephone sings in a speakeasy, offering the men of Hadestown a forbidden
taste of their earthly lives. She knows their despair and longing as only the
Queen of Underworld could: “I don’t know about you, boys / But if you’re like
me then hanging around / This old manhole is bringing you down,” she begins the
song. She’s “got the wind right here in a jar,” “the rain on tap at the bar,”
and in lovely moment of contemporary mythmaking, she’s got the moon “right here
waiting in my pay-per-view.” Mitchell’s lyrics are superb, and Ani DiFranco
performs Persephone’s silky croon with an elegance that is as seductive as the
lady herself. Persephone’s power has its bounds, but she embraces that power
fully; while Hades is the king, she is his wife, and it is her love for her
husband and her pity for Orpheus—and Hades’s love for her—that allows her to
persuade Hades to give Orpheus his chance to reclaim Eurydice. Though we know
the attempt will fail, she earns him the grace of the chance. As Orpheus sings
of the moment Hades first saw Persephone, we are pulled back into the ancient
Greek world, but these epic figures have stepped into our world today and made
that myth new again—no mean feat, given how often Orphues’s tale has been
revisited in literature and art.
I’ve been listening to Hadestown
pretty much daily for the last two months. In that time, my own poor goddess
has been closed up in her notebook, her poems neglected, while I grade papers
and argue about curriculum and advise students for their spring schedules,
while I attend Senate meetings during the day and Scout meetings
with my son at night. She’s languishing, that poor goddess, my poor book. My hour’s
commute listening this album keeps me connected to my writing, and I know that
this album wouldn’t resonate for me so powerfully if there were not something
here I must understand. My goddess tends more towards Eurydice’s longing and
grief than Persephone’s strength—and here is where I must look further—but I
don’t know yet where this observation will take me.
I believe, though, that one day when I recount my life
through albums, when I remember grading papers that year to Yo Yo Ma’s Bach Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello,
and when I think affectionately about my brief new age phase and Songs of Kuan Yin, when I am amazed at
how young I was during the Donna Summer days, I will remember Hadestown with more than my usual
fondness for the album that represents that period of my life. Hadestown is a masterwork, an elegy to
lost love, a gorgeous meditation on the need and doubt we all struggle with
each day. Listening to this music, I am Eurydice, I am Persephone, I love
Orpheus, I want Hades, and I am lost—but somehow still myself. Only in the
greatest art do we recognize ourselves and transform ourselves.
