There’s a long tradition of tragedy in the arts -- theater, song, film, poetry and literature. Tragedies are not just cautionary tales, designed to teach us about life, but they can also inspire hope. This past weekend we drove to Las Vegas to catch the musical Hadestown at the beautiful Smith Center for the Performing Arts. This is the second time we’ve seen the play, once with the original cast in New York and now in its roadshow version. Both were spectacular. In my opinion, Hadestown will emerge as an American Classic. If it is coming to your city, get tickets early. They sell out quickly. Here is the upcoming schedule. https://hadestown.com/tour Hadestown is a modern retelling of the fated love story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Unfortunately, Hades the God of the underworld, gets involved and though Hades’s lover Persephone tries to intercede it does not end the way we want it to. The staging is unmistakably about contemporary life but it also hearkens, beautifully, to the human dilemma that has not changed all that much since ancient Greece. I’ve been following the music of Anais Mitchell for a few years now. She brilliantly wrote Hadestown and has a background in folk music which is full of not just narrative ballads but also tragic songs. She also grew up with the classics with a capitol C. Mitchell wrote the music first as a folk opera, then a one woman show, then partnered with Rachel Chavkin in 2016 to develop the show for the Broadway stage. It finally opened on Broadway in 2019. The following year it won eight Tony Awards. It’s not a typical Broadway show and Covid has hampered it becoming as well-known as it should be. You can stream the soundtrack album but for my money, you need the theatrical experience to really get the impact. For starters I’d suggest listening to Anais Mitchell’s albums, Child Ballads and Young Man in America. From the former, check out “Shepherd” from her Tiny Desk Concert. It shows Anais Mitchell’s abilities to write a good tragic song.  I love dark songs and never quite know what to say when people ask me, “why don’t you write more happy songs?” For some reason, when I think of “happy songs,” I think of the cliché’d father slapping his kid at the photograper’s studio, saying “smile damnit, smile.” Don’t get me wrong. I like happy. I like comedy too. But the most satisfying – and yes, uplifting – songs tend toward the darker hues. It’s not that I write tragic ballads or song stories. Often my songs are cautionary. They paint a dark scene but don’t follow on to the tragic end. I leave that up to the listener. As a people, we still love a good tragedy. It’s in our songs, film and literature. I grew up with tragic car wrecks after the prom and the first million-selling country record was “Wreck of the Old 97,” a gruesome reminder of the perils of fast trains. Now we have hip-hop gun battles and C&W broken-heart songs. We’ll never lose the taste, even the need, for tragic stories. Why do we need tragedy in the arts? 24 hour news continually doles out tragedy with great inelegance. We can’t keep our eyes off of the graphic scenes. But it seems the major way we deal with this view of tragedy is to get angry, get political, then get alienated. Tragic songs and tragic stories offer a pressure valve that can provide a healthy way to process the hard stuff. A Momentous Announcement
CLICK HERE TO PRE ORDER in vinyl, CD, or download At least, momentous for me… My new album, Nothin’ Lastin’ starts out tragic but finds hope as the cycle of thirteen songs progress. I won’t give the rest away. After four years of work, my solo album Nothin’ Lastin’, is now available for pre-order in vinyl, CD, and digital download. It comes out officially October 7, 2022. Get it while the gettin’s good.
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How Tragedy Can be Beautiful
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