“And the big horns blowed and the pianos played/And the music rose to the old man’s ears/I guess those were the olden days/I guess those were the golden years,” sings Anaïs Mitchell on her new record The Brightness. This earnest nostalgia trip says a lot about the kind of art that this Vermont native has been creating since entering the underground folk scene in 2002. At a time when the music industry is playing the role of the slickest of defense attorneys, using flash and dazzle campaigns to distract us from the fact that their clients are terrible, Mitchell is an artist who grew up on a sheep farm. She makes small-sounding, big-thinking folk albums that play like a front-porch serenade. If she feels in a bit of a time warp, you can’t blame her.

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