Top Five Songs: Hadestown

I’ve been listening to Hadestown on a near loop lately – not quite up to Hamilton or Falsettos levels of demanding my available brain space, but darn close. What a wonderful album, featuring some incredible performers singing a magnificent score! It took some doing, but I managed to whittle it down to five favorites (Greek mythology spoilers.)

“Any Way the Wind Blows” – Great for setting up the central lovers, placing them on opposite sides of a belief spectrum. This song focuses more on Eurydice, introducing Orpheus only towards the end, but it goes a long way to show why, as much as she goes on to be taken by him and wants to have the romantic faith that he does, she’s hounded by the fear of her want and longs to find relief from scrounging.

Best lyric: It’s actually a spoken line, but I still love it anyway. “Eurydice was a hungry young girl, / A runaway from everywhere she’d ever been. / She was no stranger to the world, / No stranger to the wind.”

“Epic I” – I debated which “Epic” I wanted to include here. Honestly, I love all three, but I love too many songs in this show to give more than half of my Top Five slots to variations on the same song! We’ll go with the original then, the one that introduces Hades and Persephone’s story through Orpheus’s song. So beautiful, and Reeve Carney’s singing, to me, has a ring of Jeff Buckley in it, maybe a la “Corpus Christi Carol.” And beyond that, I just love the notion of a song with the power to put the world to rights.

Best lyric: “So King Hades agreed that for half of each year, / She would stay with him there in his world down below, / But the other half, she could walk in the sun / And the sun, in turn, burned twice as bright, / Which is where the seasons come from.”

 “Chant” – I love a good, intricate company number that covers a lot of story by weaving multiple melodies together, one over another to create a complex whole. This song has it in spades! There’s the workers’ chant, Orpheus’s continuing work on his song, Hades and Persephone’s argument over the state of Hadestown, and Eurydice fighting against the storm. Each melody/theme is great on its own, but when you put them all together, you get something so much bigger. Eva Noblezada is in especially-beautiful voice here.

Best lyric: “In the meantime up above, / The harvest dies and people starve. / Oceans rise and overflow. / It ain’t right and it ain’t natural.”

“If It’s True” – Magnificent song. It’s Orpheus in a low moment, questioning the worth of anything if the powerful control everything and there’s nothing that can be done to change it. But I love that, even though it’s him feeling hopeless, it’s also an incredible song of hope. The workers in Hadestown overhear his lament, and his words stir them to questions, move them to listen. The melody is gorgeous, especially those soaring vocals on, “If it’s true what they say, / I’ll be on my way,” and I love the echoes of the workers behind the wall.

Best lyric: “And the ones who deal the cards / Are the ones who take the tricks, / With their hands over their hearts / While we play the game they fix.”

“How Long?” – Following “If It’s True,” Persephone tries to persuade Hades to listen to Orpheus and let Eurydice go. As with “Chant,” I really like how Hades and Persephone’s relationship is depicted, something that once was beautiful that’s now turned sour and possessive. As Persephone appeals to Hades, she’s starting to rekindle something of the her she used to be, which will continue for both her and Hades with “Epic III.” I love the repeated imagery of the fire and the bird on the spit, applied to different concepts, each with a different resonance.

Best lyric: “Give them a piece, they’ll take it all. / Show them a crack, they’ll tear down the wall. / Lend them an ear and the kingdom will fall, / The kingdom will fall for a song.”