Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

Road Scholar

You might think a young singer-songwriter who caught Ani DiFranco’s attention early on would always have known she was meant to make music. But Anaïs Mitchell, who grew up on a Vermont sheep farm, once thought she’d be a journalist: “Not unlike artists,” she says, “they’re always traveling, always writing, loving their loneliness, feeling somehow that they have their finger on the pulse.” At 17, Mitchell used that passion to begin writing songs rife with metaphors drawn from politics, mythology, literature and, of course, that lonely open road. She recorded her first album, The Song They Sang When Rome Fell, in just one afternoon in Texas; after her second album she was signed to DiFranco’s label, Righteous Babe Records. The winner of the 2003 Kerrville New Folk Award brings her soprano voice back to Burlington for an intimate concert this Friday, with folk-pop alto Meg Hutchinson opening.