Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer - Child Ballads

Inventive, restless, and passionately artistic, Vermont singer-songwriter Anais Mitchell has gifted the music world with a folk opera (Hadestown, 2010), and several themed albums, including 2012's Young Man in America. This time she has teamed with Jefferson Hamer for another brilliant musical adventure. They have taken on the Child Ballads--the canon of folksongs collected by Sir Francis James Child in the late 19th century. These English and Scotish ballads inspired folk revivalists such as Dylan… Show more and Baez in the early 60s, and now in the hands of Mitchell and Hamer they are driven by two-guitar arrangements and the kind of close harmonies that call to mind Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris or an acoustic Fleetwood Mac.
This new album began as a whimsical side project--songs belted out the car window on the way to gigs--but it morphed into a serious collaboration spanning several years, three separate recording attempts, and finally superb production by Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss, Dolly Parton).
"The language, and the music, is both familiar and exotic at the same time," says Mitchell. Hamer reflects. "I'd say the songs worked on us as much as we worked on them."

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