Post and Jam "Tam Lin (child 39) by Anais Mitchell

[raven_cromwell]

Have my fav fae musical re-telling, in honor of that most marvelous and favorite of holidays: Halloween.

"Tam Lin (Child 39)" (Watch on YouTube)

Comments

[chamerion]

I love this album, and this is a great Halloween listen. Thanks for posting it!

[raven_cromwell]

OMG you're a Mitchell fan!!!! (I have to agree with you this's prob my fav of her albums, though it's closely. closely tied to Young Man In America for me. But ok: if you're a Mitchell fan, either you've already been dragged down into the obsession that's the musicalized version of Hadestown--and which's pretty much been my waking sleeping breathing hyperobsession for the last month--or I have a shot at dragging you in. If the former, omg come scream with me, and if the latter, just gonna paste some squee I've used before, with additions for your particular buttons. :d

So, a lot! of people tag this as a musical about immigration and like...they're not...wrong, exactly, but in many ways they're grafting the political topic of the time onto the musical. The musical is, though, about the worst divide/conquer methods of capitalism, of the way riches are used as...I was gonna day club, but honestly, that's not really right. More like drug, I suppose, or bread and circuses, to make people unwilling to rock the boat even to stand against their own tyranny. But it's a profoundly subtle commentary, interweaving half a dozen other themes pitch-perfectly.

I was never somebody who could really get into the concept album by which I mean: I loved! the concept itself and it had fuckin Ani DiFranco on it, so it should've been phenomenal--and Ani was a dream and so clearly influenced the Persephone casting in the musical. But for all I love Mitchell, she didn't have the chops to sell me Eurydice. And there were like...the bones of a story, some incredible subversive ideas but not really a coherent story. If you've listened to the album, your mileage may vary, but I say all that to say, oh, the break yielded such marvelous results!!! This's a fully fleshed story, deepened and enriched in a thousand ways large and small; these're 3D characters that'll rip your heart out and every seed's been mined for every ounce of potential. Listening to the album's like listening to something like Les Mis in that while it's now on my bucklist to see one of the touring productions of the show, the piece is a beautiful, utterly coherent whole.

My love for it holds that visceral intensity where a thing concerns itself so fundamentally with the things you're fixated upon. A. there're older characters with profound moral ambiguity: Persephone always caught between, both loving her husband and hating what he is simultaneously, this profoundly morally ambiguous man who needs to hoard and hoard resources before he ever feels safe/validated, and of course then never really feels any of those things because it's an endlessly rapacious pit of self-devaluation he's trying to fill. The spot Hades occupies, as villain with the possibility of redemption, but with no easy answers and having only barely begun the hard. hard road of his own, to overcome his worst impulses, when we know that Orpheus failed on a similar path fuckin takes my breath away. The idea that this revolution that he fears so much may drag him back reluctantly to goodness *queue incoherent flaily sounds*

And speaking of revolution; oh, speaking of revolution. There's poetry as revolution: love! in its most fundamental form as revolution. Eurydice as driving catalytic narrative force, not because she's fridged girlfriend of Orpheus but because her choices--this poverty-stricken, starved-to-the-bone girl, drive everything.

Jo once, to my unspeakable delight, tagged something to do with the concept album as a tale of capitalist exploitation in the best short summation I've heard to this day. It's about how capitalism warps love and so many of the principles of family. And it's so much about the urban-rural divide that fascinates both of us: the city as center of opportunity but also the place that strips away your supports. And all these themes interweave and compliment one another in ways where the resonance is so deep I can't pick them apart to articulate. It's an experience, listening again and again, going deeper and deeper into the layers of myth and mythology--both around Greek/Roman but also the political myths we construct for ourselves. And the nature of tales themselves and just fuck it's so good. I highly. highly rec the OBCR--though I know this's a point of strife within the fandom. I think it has much better narrative coherence than the New York Theater Workshop version, partially cause the NyTW has limited tracks but also because it feels like the full show in front of you, which's y'know good for those of us who can't get to live theater. ;) . Though I love! both concept and NYTW Orpheus more than broadway version, so I'd def rec picking an Orpheus track from either of those after your initial listen for a taste of the full range of that role.

[chamerion]

Yes!!! You’ve said a lot of it so well already that I just have to nod enthusiastically, but I adore Hadestown; I liked the concept album to begin with, but there’s too much writer in me not to be susceptible to the power of a fully realized narrative. And I like mythology, I like stories with political resonance, I like stories about choice, I like stories about storytelling, I like stories where both heroes and villains are all too human, I like anything that can be summarized as “it’s a sad song but we sing it anyway,” so...there was never really a possibility that I wouldn’t be into this. As you say, it’s one of those narratives that happens to hit on a whole bunch of the themes that preoccupy and fascinate me, and part of the joy is in that layered richness - the feel that you can’t absorb it all at once, that you have to keep going back because you’re going to get something different from each listen. It’s so so good and thus hard to articulate all at once in a comment, but I am happy to flail with you about it ANYTIME.

[delphi]

Ah, this is so good! I'm going to have to get this album.

[raven_cromwell]

This's hands-down my fav Mitchell, though it's closely followed by Young Man In America. I dunno why, but as is clear with Hadestown, Mitchell pushes her artistic envelope more--to so far phenomenal! results--when she has co-creators, which's the case on this album as well.

I love this album for so many reasons, starting with the fact she picked fairly obscure subjects within the Celtic folk canon, so that even though we've become saturated with the best of folk music from the isles, these feel fresh and new. But they also feel wonderfully fresh because she knows! that there're already geniuses like Loreena who've tread the do European folk with a European sound. And so she transposes these immensely Celtic pieces onto a more North-American folk soundscape--very little stringed instruments; almost no drums or piano, very guitar-heavy.

And the novelty, to expand what's possible for Celtic music and not trying to reproduce what you know's been done to perfection already is so damn refreshing and brave. And actually works; I'm shocked by how much different arrangements/tempo changes so completely alter the feel of the tales. They're not places for the manifestations of the eerily supernatural anymore, though that's of course present. Bringing the guitar in somehow shifts the focus to the incredibly amazingly plucky folk fighting and more often than not winning against the supernatural. Even after repeated listens it's a phenomenon I can't entirely articulate or understand how she achieves. But oh, I can glory in it. :)