Listen: Anaïs Mitchell w/ Justin Vernon – 'Wedding Song'

Before 2010 had even yelped into our hungover ears, we knew which albums we were really looking forward to: Teen Dream, High Violet, Heaven Is Whenever and so on. All great albums, but there’s a lovely element of surprise in being totally taken aback by something you’ve hardly even heard of before, let alone seen climbing the hotly contested rungs of Hype Machine.

Anaïs Mitchell’s fourth album, Hadestown, is a prime example of this – we at TLOBF had always taken a little shine to her earlier folkings, but it’s her folk opera about the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in Depression-era New Orleans, that’s just blown our minds.

There’s a huge supporting cast on the record – Anaïs plays Eurydice with sweet naivety, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon makes a great turn as the lovelorn Orpheus, Ani DiFranco is the wily but maternal Persephone, Greg Brown plays a gruff voiced Hades that’ll give you the willies, and Ben Knox Miller from The Low Anthem makes an appearance too.

This, ‘Wedding Song’, is one of the album’s simpler cuts though, demonstrating the simple elegance of Mitchell’s retelling of many a millennia-old myth. The opening track to the record, it sees Orpheus and Eurydice singing about how they’re going to pay for their wedding – she’s a pragmatist, worrying about where they’re going to find the money, whilst his head is in the clouds, looking to nature as a solution and steadfastly refusing to answer to her reality. It’s such an incredible song in so many ways – its woodsy tapping and pedal steel sound delicious, and the way in which it sews a thread between ancient, 20th century and modern history isn’t just testament to the universality of experience, but to Mitchell’s sublime songwriting skills. You can’t afford not to listen to this album – ‘Wedding Song’ is just the tip of its charm.