Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer

Anais Mitchell (from her bio)
If there's a common thread in Mitchell's workfrom her earliest ballads, to the opera, to this new chapterit's that she's as interested in the world around her as the one inside her. She has a way of tackling big themes with the same emotional intimacy most artists use to describe their inner lives. "That's why," as one journalist put it, "there's a sexual ambiguity about her work and why, even in her most intimate moments, she never sounds like a confessional songwriter."… Show more It doesn't matter whether the stories she tells are her own or someone else's. "The emotions are my own," says Mitchell. "As for the Young Man, he's in me too, I feel his restlessness a lot. He's a part of me like my dad's old book or like something an old lover said one time. Those parts of ourselves that haunt us, sometimes we have to appease them with an offering of food and wine so they'll quit haunting us for a while. This album is that kind of offering."
Jefferson Hamer
Jefferson Hamer is a self-taught instrumentalist and singer, inspired by popular music and the distilled folk sounds of America, Ireland, and the British Isles. He began his career in Colorado in the late 90s as a guitarist and harmony singer, and absorbed the California-Country spirit of Gram Parsons in equal measure with English folk visionaries like Richard Thompson and Martin Carthy and the mystical Irish sounds of Planxty. After a decade of relentless road touring with his bands Single Malt Band and Great American Taxi, he settled in New York City, epicenter of the American melting pot. His most recent projects include a harmony-rich string duo with Dublin-born NYC folk luminary Eamon O'Leary called The Murphy Beds, and a much-anticipated collection of reworked English folk songs in collaboration with acclaimed songwriter Anais Mitchell, called Child Ballads.

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