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Think Again - a Big Think Podcast

232. Anaïs Mitchell (Jason Plays Favorites #4) – sometimes the god speaks through you

Think Again - a Big Think Podcast

Big Think / Panoply

Arts, Society & Culture

4.6594 Ratings

🗓️ 29 February 2020

⏱️ 58 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

[From February through March 22, 2020 (his last day hosting Think Again) Jason will be revisiting favorite past episodes. Jason's new show, starting May 12th, is Clever Creature with Jason Gots.] -- Among other things, music can be medicine. Like a vaccine, it sometimes works by giving your body a little taste of the disease. Other times, of course, you just wanna dance, and James Brown might be just what you need. But the medicine songs I’m talking about are the ones that break your heart open no matter many times you hear them. And you want them to—because that’s what it feels like to be alive. Nobody knows this better than my guest today, singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. Like the centuries of blues and folk songs that echo through it, transubstantiated by her voice and guitar into something almost too beautiful to bear, her music is powerful medicine. Anaïs wrote all the songs, lyrics and the book of the new (14x Tony-nominated!) Broadway musical, HADESTOWN, directed by Rachel Chavkin. It makes new again the ancient story of the singer-songwriter Orpheus and his lover Eurydice, who he follows all the way to hell, and leads most of the way back again.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Have you ever wondered what a sandwich sounds like?

0:03.0

Not much to it is there?

0:06.0

Unless of course it's a Walker's sandwich.

0:10.0

Mmm, that is good.

0:13.0

Now that's what Asani should sound like.

0:16.0

Go all crisp in with walkers.

0:18.0

Delicious.

0:20.0

So from now until March 23rd, the last day that I'll be on Think Again, I'm running this

0:27.8

series that I'm calling Jason Plays Favorites.

0:31.8

In listening back to today's episode with singer-songwriter Anaas Mitchell. I was moved all over again by what she

0:41.1

said about the myth of Orpheus, how Orpheus, who is in some ways like the original singer-songwriter,

0:48.8

the original poet, you know, goes all the way down to Hades to rescue his lover, Eurydice, gets halfway back up,

0:57.5

and then looks back, which he's not supposed to do, and she's pulled back into Hades,

1:03.4

and he fails in his quest.

1:06.4

NAS pointed out that he is a hero in spite of being a failure, that all over the world theaters

1:13.7

are named the Orpheum. He's a hero because he tried to do the impossible thing.

1:19.8

We were talking about singer-songwriters, you know, and musicians and how, you know, sometimes

1:25.4

when you have a favorite musician, you get disappointed at some

1:28.0

point in their career. They put out an album that you don't love. And she says that she likes to

1:33.9

listen to the whole arc of a musician's career and realize that, you know, sometimes the muse

1:43.2

speaks through them. sometimes she doesn't,

1:46.6

but she finds beauty and takes heart in the fact that they keep going. Again, dreaming the

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