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From the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Hadestown

Anaïs Mitchell

2010

Hadestown
Album Summary

This album has been submitted by a user and is not included in any edition of the book.

Hadestown is the fourth studio album by American folk singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, and was released by Righteous Babe Records on March 9, 2010. The concept album, which became the basis for the stage musical of the same name, follows a variation on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where Orpheus must embark on a quest to rescue his wife Eurydice from the underworld. It has been advertised as a "folk opera". Several of the songs feature singers other than Mitchell, including Justin Vernon, Ani DiFranco, Greg Brown, Ben Knox Miller, and The Haden Triplets (Tanya, Petra and Rachel Haden). The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package in the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. Between 2006 and 2007, Mitchell staged performances of Hadestown, a musical based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Unsure what lay ahead for the stage musical, she decided to turn it into a concept album. Raising a few thousand dollars by emailing her fan base and asking them to pitch in for shirts and other merchandise, Mitchell worked on the album for over a year. The album encompasses a variety of American roots music forms, including folk, indie folk, country, blues, ragtime, gospel, rock, swing, and avant-garde.

Wikipedia

Rating

3.24

Votes

105

Genres

  • Folk

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Reviews

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Jan 13 2025
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4

Love this one, kudos to whoever chose this one! Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who's ever heard of Anais Mitchell. I found her through her Tiny Desk performance many years ago and became obsessed. Seriously, an incredible singer and songwriter, and the fact that she made this stage play (by now, it's become a Broadway thing and won Tonys!) is really impressive. Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on this thing is also awesome. "Why We Build the Wall" is still one of the greatest songs ever, ever. I could write an essay about that one, but will save my breath today. Anyway, fantastic album. 4.5/5

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Dec 18 2024
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4

What ever you think this album will be, it will surprise you.

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Dec 22 2024
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4

I never heard of Anaïs Mitchell before this list. The album consists of great songs, inspiring lyrics and terrific guest singers.

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Jan 08 2025
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4

This is great and as a side note, Ani DiFranco should have an album on this list.

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Dec 18 2024
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3

A folk album that is elevated from being quite nice to cool and intriguing by Greg Brown's Tom Waits-esque vocals popping up on a handful of tracks. Rating: 3.5 Playlist track: Hey, Little Songbird Date listened: 17/12/24

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Dec 24 2024
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5

Always up for a musical concept album. Liked this quite a bit, now I want to see the musical!

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Dec 24 2024
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5

I'd heard about this as a show but had never really followed through with finding anything out about it. It's lovely. Thank you!

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Dec 24 2024
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5

Wonderful! I'm very interested in seeing this show now...

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Mar 30 2025
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5

Not 1st listen! “Oh my god… I get it now” My curiosity about this album/musical led me to seek it out last year, as well as some Bonny Light Horseman music, a group Anaïs Mitchell is part of. It’s a particularly odd case, where I felt it was caught between its various genres and influences at first listen. Too cleanly produced for rootsy folk, too dry & deadpan for the theatrics, plus the only voice I was familiar with was Vernon/Bon Iver, which kept distracting me from the story. But today, somehow, all the threads came together. The added context of financial woes to the Orpheus & Eurydice story goes a long way in making it contemporary, where the rattles of cello and musical saw keep the songs planted in this eerie, Tom Waits-esque world of Hadestown without overwhelming the lyrics and story.

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Dec 13 2024
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4

very cool and interesting and dark music feel it would be better watching it as a musical rather than an album.

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Dec 15 2024
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4

I liked this pretty well. I'm not surenit needed to be well-versed an hour, or that it brought anything much new to this well-travelled myth, antlers it was leaning on Tom Waits pretty heavily throughout. But the music was very nice and it generally held up.

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Dec 15 2024
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4

Folk, Americana, indie folk. Me han gustado algunas canciones. Venga, un 4.

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Dec 16 2024
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4

I had no knowledge of this, weirdo fun and I’d love to see the musical

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Dec 23 2024
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4

I get major theater kid vibes from this pick despite this technically being the concept album version. It’s a good album though with a solid mix of jazz and blues applied to Greek mythology which is super unique. Also why we build the wall feels a bit too literal now despite it being written almost two decades ago.

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Jan 13 2025
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4

Never listened to the album but Why We Build the Wall is a classic. My brother introduced me to that song. We build the wall to keep us free...powerful stuff. I was shocked to learn the album was from 2010, I would have bet money it was 70's. The whole album is very unique too, lots of folk and jazz. Songs like When the Chips are Down reminded of New Orleans. All in all, very cool someone included this album so I could reminisce about those memories. Also caught Justin Vernon on a couple songs, I believe that is Bon Iver himself.

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Jan 15 2025
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4

Very interesting & enjoy Anais' voice...Appreciate this recommendation!

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Mar 01 2025
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4

This is going to be a tough review. I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this, never having heard of it, or her. When it started up, I was genuinely pretty intrigued. And then she started singing, and oh my very god, I hate her vocal style. Justin Vernon is grand - and Greg Brown is better - but when the primary artist has a voice that drives you nuts, it makes it very hard to work through. It really is a shame, because in almost every other respect, I actually really quite like this. I say "almost every" because there's that fingernails-on-a-blackboard "bwap-bwap-bwooow!" of country guitars every so often too. God. I really can't express how much I hate her vocal affectations. In "Flowers", 'red' becomes 'Ray-ee-aye-eh-hed' - utterly piss-boiling, especially as it's clear she's actually got a voice in her. If it wasn't for her indie-girl, cursive singing nonsense, I think I'd actually say this was one of the better entries on the list - easily top 100 - but I'm afraid I really am gonna have a ding a star for it.

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Mar 12 2025
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4

A really cool bluesgrass/rootsy album that sounds like Ancient Greece by way of New Orleans. The instrumentation is brilliantly rustic, the songwriting is winding but also hooky, and the narrative drives the whole thing along at a great pace without diverting from the impact of the music. It really is crying out to be a musical and it’s quite surprising it took six years to bring it back to the stage - all of the key elements are already here! Mitchell gives a very diverse and powerful performance, but it’s the guests who really do help bring this version to life. Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco both sound fantastic as Orpheus and Persephone all across the record, and Greg Brown’s Hades sounds like he smokes twenty Tom Waits’ a day

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Dec 14 2024
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3

There are some things I like about this, but I'm really not a fan of musical theatre. It's just sort of over the top dramatic. I may check out other works by her to see if there are some that are less theatre-y. 3 stars.

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Dec 14 2024
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3

This was something completely new to me, and it was pretty nice actually.

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Dec 14 2024
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3

Half an hour would have been enough, but it was interesting at least

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Dec 16 2024
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3

I remember reviewing this for my local student radio station in college when it came out. It's an interesting project with some fun numbers (one or two are earworms for sure). Overall it feels less than the sum of its parts.

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Jan 31 2025
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3

That time that Tom Waits had a jam with the cast of Sesame Street.

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Mar 13 2025
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3

I was interested to find that the musical I had been listening to was a concept album first. I think I preferred this one, it made more sense.

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Mar 14 2025
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3

Pretty interesting, enjoyed it more than I thought.

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Mar 16 2025
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3

Overall this was decent. With all the different voices a couple of the songs sounded straight out of a musical. Some interesting songs.

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Dec 13 2024
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2

Interesting proposal with retro overtones, but nothing spectacular. A very long album for this type of more "passive" performance, it was tiring.

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Dec 15 2024
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2

A re-imagining of a Broadway soundtrack recorded as its own album? Kind of a silly premise to begin with – losing the orchestral flair (and going for this super-soft indie vibe) means the dramatic moments aren’t emphasized, and at the end of the day I now still have to watch the play to get the full experience. An hour of softly-whispered narrative with only a few dramatic highlights is a lot to ask of a listener without the staging behind it, and as a standalone LP this falls flat on its face as a result.

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Dec 16 2024
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2

Wasn’t for me. I can see why people would like it, but just not anything I would ever want to listen to again.

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Dec 18 2024
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2

I thought this album was a bit odd until I realized it’s an accompaniment to a play. In that sense it makes sense why it sounds the way it does but it still doesn’t make the album all that enjoyable. It’s like not being part of an inside joke. The Justin Vernon songs weren’t bad. 4.6/10

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Jan 08 2025
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2

I have nothing but a question mark about all of this. Why does it exist? Why would this be nominated to the list? HUH?

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Jan 22 2025
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2

It's all very route one lyrically. Nice music, and I get it was a musical, but it always seems to go for the easiest rhyme, the most obvious statement. Not a bad album, but it felt a bit obvious. Probably suffers from following some prog lunacy yesterday.

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Feb 06 2025
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2

Not sure this is an addition to the list

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Mar 11 2025
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2

Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SU0gFPMwP8 Jesus fucking Christ, who is the evil warlock forcing modern pop/indie artists to sing with that godforsaken affectation and how do we break his curse. Justin Vernon was pretty good though. Other than that, this is a pretty standard concept album about the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with an Americana spin. Extremely cheesy, kinda just straight up stupid at times, but that's par for the course, I guess. Not a Musicals kind of guy. Interesting choice nonetheless. Strong 2/5.

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Dec 15 2024
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1

Oh god the first minute or so of this was a real rollercoaster. First I read that it was folky, which made me want to throw up. Then the first few notes of acoustic kicked in, and it sounded alright. Felt a bit of hope. Then the chick's voice started and I felt physically ill. The guy's voice seemed vaguely passage, but then he either changed it or another guy turned up with an even worse voice. By the time I got to some gang singing "COME ON DOWN TO HADES TOWN" I realised it was just an irredeemable piece of utter shit with an added rock opera snobbishness. It went for about another 45 agonising minutes, loving itself the entire way. This was just too much for me. That whole vibe where art school dorks pretend they're voodoo southern cajun hipsterbilly honky-tonk afficionados, all high on reviews they or their friends wrote for their own stuff, probably referring to themselves as a "collective"... ugh, spare me. 1/5.

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Dec 14 2024
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4

Rating: 8/10 Best songs: Way down Hadestown, Hey little songbird, Doubt comes in

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Dec 13 2024
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3

One thing I will say for this album is that it's thematically ambitious in a way I wish I heard more in music. Musically it was fine, if with a rather strained, oddball vintage sensibility. I imagine this plays better if you are familiar with the musical it inspired, or even with Greek mythology. I struggled with Anaïs Mitchell's voice and mostly preferred the tracks that featured other vocalists. "Flowers (Eurydice's Song)" was a notable exception. Fave Songs: Hey, Little Songbird; Flowers (Eurydice's Song); If It's True; Wait for Me

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Feb 12 2025
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3

Fourth studio album!!! Go album! It's decent. Not really sure how many more times I'm going to listen to it, though.

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