Child Ballads adapted as love songs

In the late 1800s, Harvard University professor Frances James Child collected hundreds of lyrics and poems from the British ballad tradition. Published as Popular English and Scottish Ballads, they became known as the Child Ballads. The collection - five volumes of variations of 305 story-songs - has influenced generations of artists, from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span to the Decemberists and Fleet Foxes.

Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer recorded seven of them for their new album, also called Child Ballads, and their understated, direct approach stresses the captivating narratives of songs such as "Tamlin" and "Sir Patrick Spens."

Mitchell is a Vermont-based singer-songwriter with a penchant for the mythic: 2010's folk-opera Hadestown reset the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in Depression-era America; last year's Young Man in America was a song cycle about characters struggling to define their identities.

Hamer was playing lead guitar in Mitchell's band when the two discovered their shared love of the Child Ballads, and they worked on versions of them over the course of two years, scrapping two early attempts at the recording before deciding that the best approach was the simplest, with little more than acoustic guitars and the interplay between Mitchell's voice, sweet but astringent, and Hamer's, clear and comforting.

Although they studied the Child texts carefully, Mitchell and Hamer adapted some lyrics to make them more accessible and relevant to contemporary listeners.

"I don't think for either of us it was an academic interest that sparked the project," says Mitchell. "It was really more creative. We loved the stories almost in a way a little kid loves a story or we all love a good yarn spun well.

Mitchell says it's a funny line to walk. "The source material is so powerful, and you don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. On the other hand, it's not about making a museum piece. It's about bringing the stories alive for a new audience in a new era, and that requires rolling up the sleeves and taking the back off it and tinkering with it."

But the tinkering was subtle. The goal was to let the stories be vivid and immediate: Mitchell admires their "cinematic" ability to show rather than tell. For the album, they chose seven of the numerous songs they recorded, the ones that were most collaborative, that "really were the product of our twinned minds," she says.

"I don't remember us setting out to record songs with a particular theme, but I do think a lot of the songs end up being love songs, in a way," Mitchell says. "They're about lovers faced with these great trials in order to be together, and sometimes they win and sometimes they don't. There's a lot of passion in the characters."

There's a lot of understated passion in this beautiful, winning album as well.