"Not since Bob Dylan's early years has a 23 year old songwriter had such power and meaning. Hymns for the Exiled comes to us from both sides of a story, here and there, inside and out. With literary aplomb, she gives us footnotes in the artwork, so that we can do our reading and catch up with her. Political and poetic, personal and universal, Anaïs Mitchell's work is my latest obsession. Look for her influence on my future projects."
-Jonathan Byrd

"Folk music is in good hands."
-Susan Werner

It is a rare thing when a songwriter can deliver a powerful political message without compromise to the songs' poetic value. Mitchell's fusion of American roots music with high literary sensibility and broad cultural/political understanding is something new. An enormous presence on the stage, with a mix of girlishness and fierce intellect, Anaïs is utterly disarming. The raw, sweet timbre of her voice and serene picking style draw you in, and her dazzling lyrics keep you there. On "Hymns for the Exiled" she writes from the perspective of an Arabian woman; an American child caught between terrifying reality and anti-terrorist rhetoric; of the cynical political use of the survivors of the Quecreek Flood; of the death of an Austin drummer, and her grandmother's dress.
Raised by a novelist and a community organizer in rural New England, Anaïs grew up listening to Dylan and the Dead, Cohen, Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell, Ani, Dar Williams and Tori Amos. At 18, she moved to Boston, where she did time at open mikes and the Park St. T station. At twenty, she moved to Austin, where she released her debut album, "The Song They Sang When Rome Fell." The Kerrville Folk Festival honored her work with the prestigious New Folk award in 2003. She recently graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont, with a degree in political science. Anaïs is passionate about the music of her native land, from old-school country to dustbowl labor ballads to rebel rock. Anaïs has spent extensive time in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, studying languages (Spanish, German, and Arabic) and international politics, bringing a worldly depth to her writing - which she presents to her audience with a graceful presence of spirit.

1. Before the Eyes of Storytelling Girls
2. 1984
3. Cosmic American
4. The Belly & the Beast
5. Orion
6. Mockingbird
7. I wear your Dress
8. A Hymn for the Exiled
9. Quecreek Flood
10. Two Kids
11. One Good Thing

before the eyes of storytelling girls
by anaïs mitchell

i could tell you stories like the government tells lies
ah, but no one listens anymore
in the rooms, the women come and go
talking on the mobile phones
and the television talks about the war
when i was a baby, there was laughter in my house
my daddy smoked domestic cigarettes
and thursday nights on the radio
live in concert- live from cairo:
mother of egypt!

mama, mama, be with me
with the music in your breast
in your glittering evening dress
and the white flag in your fist trembling

i could tell you stories like the past was dead and gone
but i know nothing changes in this world
every day the muezzin calls
the sun comes up and baghdad falls
before the eyes of storytelling girls
she was just a poor man’s daughter
going down into the sultan’s bed
he was desert, she was water
and he remembered every word she said, that she said,

and i say, grandma, grandma, be with me
in your tragic wedding gown
with your long hair hanging down
and the stories tumbling out, tumbling

i could tell you stories like the government tells lies
ah, but no one listens anymore
in the rooms the women come and go
talking on the mobile phones
and the television talks about the war, about the war
the television talks about the war

Anaïs:

dear reader,
well I wrote this song when I was a student in cairo. I was taking a modern Arabic literature in translation course with a feisty and wonderful middle-aged Egyptian woman. I’d give her name but I wouldn’t want to embarrass her with all this grandiosity and projected meaning if she surfs the internet. she was small, with dark eyes and eyeliner, animated, tough, liberated, leftist, bohemian. she was a child of the Nasser era, the late fifties & early sixties. whatever Nasser stood for, and surely it wasn’t all bread & roses, I get the vivid sense that this was an era of great optimism. there was feminism, nationalism, arab unity, Marxism, secularism, all kinds of interesting and brazen ideas kicking around, there was domestic industry, a flourishing art scene, the famous Egyptian singer om kalsoum was at her zenith and her thursday night concerts were radio broadcast across the arab world. a sense of dignity and unity and forward motion. maybe it was just that, a sense, but one that colored a generation. my professor had all of that principled romantic integrity and yet there she was in the 21st century teaching a generation raised under utterly different circumstances. I’m almost afraid to get too specific here, because the song is impressionistic and so is my limited understanding of the region and the culture. but there is a sense of dejection now in Egypt that I couldn’t ignore. the series of moves to “liberalize” and “democratize” have gone hand in hand with corruption which twists the liberal ideas of the mind’s eye into grotesque agents of inequality, the big lie. then the wars. the simultaneous dependency and humiliation visa-vis the west, especially the states. then the conservative swing taken by Islam. well the students in my class were mostly that very lucky segment of the population whose families would get the cream of the privatization, they were educated in English, they would go to London, they would go shopping in the gulf. and there were of course exceptions but I have to say none of the students seemed very moved by my professor’s passionate appeals, by the literature, by the her tales of battling censorship on behalf of cairo’s tiny literary community. “what did Nasser call the citizens?” she asked. no reply. “brothers and sisters. and what does mubarak call us?” silence. “children.” so. it was modern Arabic literature in translation we were reading, mahfouz, khanafani, all sorts, and of course underlying it, the way homer underlies western literature, was the thousand and one nights. stories within a story. a bloodthirsty misogynist caliph marries a new virgin each night and has her executed next morning. but the brave shaherizade has a plan, when it is her turn to marry the caliph she begins a story so compelling that he can’t bear to have her killed before hearing the story’s end. the next day she finishes the tale and begins another, just as fascinating. this goes on for years and through her powerful stories she transforms the caliph into a benevolent and wise king. so she, a woman, a subject, a victim, with every power stripped from her, can in fact alter the course of history through her stories. in the song, a middle aged arab woman facing the bleak falseness of the modern era appeals to her “mother”—that is om kalsoum-- and her “grandmother”-- shaherizade—to be with her, to invest in her the storytelling power that even the powerless retain. to help her reach out to this strange lost generation. I could write pages more on this, but I already feel a bit like I’ve dissected a poor helpless animal in public, so there you have it, and I hope I didn’t dissect it in vain but that this knowledge will contribute to that sort of science which we are all studying. respectfully, anaïs.