Child Ballads (album)
| Child Ballads | |||||
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| Studio album by Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer | |||||
| Released | February 11, 2013 | ||||
| Recorded | 2012 | ||||
| Genre | Folk | ||||
| Length | 39:46 | ||||
| Label | Wilderland | ||||
| Producer | Gary Paczosa | ||||
| Anaïs Mitchell chronology | |||||
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| Jefferson Hamer chronology | |||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Robert Christgau | B+ |
| The Guardian |   |
| The Independent | |
| The Observer | |
| Pitchfork Media | 7/10 |
| PopMatters | 8/10 |
| Uncut | 8/10 |
Child Ballads is a studio album by American singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and musician Jefferson Hamer, released on February 11, 2013, by Wilderland Records. Mitchell and Hamer arranged old folk ballads from the collection of the same name by Francis James Child. They recorded the album with producer Gary Paczosa in early 2012. Child Ballads received generally positive reviews from music critics.
A few years before her previous album, Young Man in America, Mitchell started becoming more interested in traditional music. She ended up purchasing a series of books: the 'Francis J. Child Collection of Ballads', also known as the "Child Ballads", and was inspired by the "beautiful" language and the "pure-heartedness of storytelling" of the songs. The "Child Ballads" was collected by Harvard professor Francis James Child, who gathered more than 300 folk songs from England and Scotland during the late 19th century. They later became a canon in modern folk music, whose artists frequently recorded the songs, which dealt with narratives of witchery, honor, curses, and transformations.
In 2011, Mitchell mentioned that as well as writing the Young Man record, she was also in the midst of working on a collection of the ballads with friend and frequent collaborator Jefferson Hamer. The duo picked seven of the 305 ballads compiled by Child and recorded the album in early 2012 with Nashville producer Gary Paczosa (known for his work with Alison Krauss and Dolly Parton). Never once putting on headphones while recording, Mitchell describes the album as an "intimate one, featuring a lot of close harmonies and two-acoustic-guitar arrangements".
The album was released by Wilderland Records on February 11, 2013, in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, and on March 19 in the United States and Canada.
The artwork was created by Peter Nevins, who also did the cover art for Mitchell's 2010 album Hadestown. The cover depicts two lovers, embracing one another, with an optical illusion of either head looking over either of the two's shoulders. For the whole album art, Nevins printed one image for each of the seven songs.
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