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    Why Does Spotify Wrapped Think My ‘Sound Town’ Is Burlington, Vermont?

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    The music streaming service released a new feature — Sound Towns — with its yearly summary of listener preferences and linked many people to an unexpected city.Do you listen to a lot of Noah Kahan? How about boygenius? Taylor Swift? Odie Leigh? Car Seat Headrest? Indigo Girls? Brandi Carlile?Well, it might be time for you to visit Burlington, Vt.! Spotify thinks you’ll be in good company there. Pack layers and bring a hat!On Wednesday, the music platform released Spotify Wrapped, its annual summation of users’ streaming habits. This year, the campaign included a new feature called Sound Town, showing users a city in the world where others’ listening habits reportedly correspond to their own.Users have been both baffled and entertained by the results, with many posting on social media that Burlington, a town in northwest Vermont, was their designated Sound Town.Dr. Orlando Garner, an I.C.U. doctor in Midland, Texas, was surprised at that result, given that his top artist of the year was Bad Bunny. (Spotify informed Dr. Garner, 36, that the city was chosen because he also listened to boygenius, Courtney Barnett and Car Seat Headrest.)“This is the second year in a row where he’s my top artist,” he said. “Are people listening to Bad Bunny in Burlington, Vt.? That’s what really struck me. Is this accurate?”A spokesperson for Spotify said there were 1,300 Sound Town locations for the platform’s 574 million users. Of them, 0.6 percent were assigned to Burlington — a number disproportionately higher than if listeners had been distributed evenly.Online, some users have joked that Spotify designated certain cities — specifically Burlington, Cambridge, Mass. and Berkeley, Calif. — for L.G.B.T.Q. users. (“Did Your Spotify Wrapped Place You In Burlington, Berkeley, or Cambridge? You May Be Gay,” read a headline from the online publication Them.)Tiffany Hammer, a tarot card reader from Puyallup, Wash., felt the city was a sonic fit for her. “I do listen to a lot of Noah Kahan. I said throughout this year, ‘If I’m not listening to Taylor Swift, I’m listening to Noah Kahan,” said Hammer, 38, adding that she thought her penchant for indie and folk music might have placed her in the Pacific Northwest.Hammer, who is queer, said Burlington felt aligned with her identity. “I really think it’s coming down to having safe places to be recognized, to listen, to just exist peacefully,” she said.The sudden burst of cultural linkage to Burlington caught city officials by surprise.“It was not on my Wednesday surprise bingo card,” John Flanagan, a spokesperson for Burlington City Arts, a city-affiliated cultural space.But Flanagan, 37, did not pass up a chance to promote his city.“I know a lot of the artists that we’ve been identified with are artists who identify as queer,” Flanagan said. “So a lot of people who listen to those artists are aligning with Burlingtonian values. And I think that’s spot on. And we really do pride ourselves on inclusivity and exquisite taste.”Burlington has a population of roughly 45,000 people, about 85.6 percent are white, above the national average, according to the census. Notable artists and bands have emerged from the Burlington area, including the jam band Phish, as well as singer-songwriters like Grace Potter and Kahan, who has recently broken through to stardom. With events like the summer’s Festival of Fools, a celebration of busking; and an underground music scene, Burlington does have a certain cultural cache, Flanagan noted.“Many people are drawn to Burlington because it’s just got a reputation as a vibrant arts community,” Flanagan said. “And I get the sense that might be what Spotify is kind of going for here.”Howard Dean, who was the governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003, said that he had “absolutely no idea” why Spotify had linked so many to Burlington. He guessed it has something to do with the fact that the city is home to the University of Vermont — which has about 14,000 enrollees.“Vermont has, I think, the second- or third-highest education rate in the country, and with interest in education comes interest in culture and it’s skewed young because of the university. It is pretty much a cultural haven,” Dean said.The Burlington designation struck Kelly Gray, a University of Vermont alumna, as “hilarious.”“I had gone to a lot of like D.I.Y. shows in Burlington in my time there,” said Gray, 26. (D.I.Y. shows loosely refer to music shows that are out of the mainstream and built at the local level.) “So I kind of felt like I had earned it, whereas others were maybe more, stolen valor for Burlington music scene clout.”Meghan Sweeney, a 29-year-old in Brooklyn, has no connection to Vermont, having grown up in Long Island. Nonetheless, Spotify recommended the city to her — to her confusion — with Smashing Pumpkins, The Pixies and LCD Soundsystem reportedly making her very Burlington-ish.“I went to Vermont, I think, once as a child and then fairly recently as an adult,” Ms. Sweeney said, “and I don’t think my music taste really screams in Vermont based off the experience that I’ve had.”Ms. Sweeney suggested that it could be an aesthetic choice by Spotify.“I feel like every year Spotify comes up with new creative ways to diagnose clinical depression,” Ms. Sweeney said. “So my guess is that it’s because it gets like really cold there, and it’s like mostly dark for half of the year. So it’s very moody.” More

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      At 89, Still Making Art (and Bread) With a Message in Vermont

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      Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater is going strong and, at 89, so is he. But what will happen to his company when he is gone?Under an unforgiving sun during a heat wave in July, Peter Schumann, the 89-year-old artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater, rang a hand bell on a rolling hillside in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before him a post topped with a giant grasping papier-mâché hand towered high like a maypole. Two dozen performers encircled it.“Walk slower, get closer to each other,” shouted Schumann, a tawny bearded man. More giant hands on poles rose up, seemingly reaching to the clouds in prayer. Then the group sang a dirge-like song as birds called from a nearby pine forest that is home to handmade memorial huts for friends and family. In two days, this surreal ritual was to be recreated in the debut of “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant,” part of the 60-year-old company’s season of Sunday shows.In addition to directing, Peter Schumann plays musical instruments, sculpts, paints on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard, and creates posters and printed chapbooks.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn July and August, the theater’s events run on weekends and are either free or modestly priced: indoor avant-garde performances, an outdoor circus featuring playful political sketches with towering effigy-like figures and a rowdy band, and side shows created by company members on compact stages are among the offerings.Schumann, a German immigrant who has retained his accent, came to New York City in the 1960s and found a potent way to respond in the streets to the war in Vietnam and social injustice: towering papier-mâché and cardboard figures. Influenced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham and exposed to the happenings of Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, he conceives his experimental collaborative pieces from a cauldron of ideas about the joys and ills of a conflicted capitalist world. Often they are drawn from the news, sometimes from legends. Some are reviewed well, others not. Schumann, uninterested in praise or media attention, keeps making them.In addition to directing, he sculpts, paints (on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard), and creates posters, calendars and printed chapbooks. He also uses an outdoor oven to bake coarse sourdough rye bread to feed audiences that can grow to a thousand or more in August.A horse puppet taking the field in “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant.”Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said on that pre-opening Friday last month while baking for about 50 summer company members. He knows that like his work, his bread can be challenging to chew, but hopefully nourishing and worth the trouble.Lately, Bread and Puppet Theater, which performs all over the world, has been growing. Its domestic touring schedule — to colleges, theaters, city plazas and small towns via a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life (coffee cups, flowers, the occasional “Ah!”) — included 66 stops last fall with a company of 30, twice the size of previous years. Print sales are up, too. Renewed interest in live performance and the current political climate may explain it. But appreciation for the company’s sustainable, handmade tactility and poetic anti-authoritarianism is nothing new.“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said of his sourdough rye bread, which he feeds to audiences.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter baking the bread in outdoor ovens, he brings the loaves into his kitchen to cool.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesHoward Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” cited its “beauty, magic and power” in a blurb for “Rehearsing With Gods,” a 2004 book about the company. Grace Paley marched with the group starting in the 1960s, and wrote a poem inspired by its policy of speaking up and speaking out. Julie Taymor, who used natural materials, papier-mâché and puppets in the stage adaptation of “The Lion King,” referenced some of Schumann’s stock puppet figures in her 2007 Beatles movie, “Across the Universe.” Kiki Smith, the sculptor, in an interview on the Smithsonian’s archive website, talked about the company’s “epic and biblical qualities” and of seeing its performances often in her youth.Guided by Schumann’s uncompromising views about greed, racism and militarism, the collective has questioned the World Bank, the treatment of Indigenous people and, to some in-house and public consternation, the providing of arms to Ukraine instead of ways to negotiate.The troupe presents free or modestly priced circuses, pageants and other performance arts on summer weekends.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann said of a childhood in which he experienced bombings in Germany’s Silesia region, which is now part of Poland. “There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.”The printing press posters, chapbooks and calendars he designs drive his messages home and come from an uncompromising faith in “Cheap Art.” His manifesto about it states the importance of its unimportance — cheap, lightweight, undermining the sanctity of affluence and in opposition to the money-hungry “business of art.” For decades, his wife, Elka Schumann, who died in 2021, on a Sunday in August, oversaw the printing press that turns out countless pieces, all drawn with his bold and expressionistic hand and celebrating life while questioning abuses of power. (One poster of an iris reads “Resistance to the Empire”; a chapbook on courage urges “Dig through the dirt.”)But for all the questions firing like flares at society, with Schumann’s humor and pathos, there is one — far more insular in focus — on the minds of those around him: What will happen to his company when he is gone?“It’s been an ongoing conversation for 15 years, and we’re still figuring it out,” said his son Max Schumann, 59, an artist and the departing executive director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit based in New York City that sells artists’ books.Guides help audience members navigate the woods.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesSome of the puppets during the circus performance.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“This company has always been an iffy little enterprise that depends way too much on me,” his father said of Bread and Puppet, which has a million-dollar annual budget raised through touring, print sales, tickets and donations, but no direct corporate or government funding. “Is it sustainable when I’m gone and will people recognize it as important?”Those questions remain unanswered as Schumann’s incessant creation of new work keeps the focus on the present.INSIDE A BARN last month, a couple of hours after the rehearsal for the “Heart of the Matter” pageant, several dozen performers from around the world — paid puppeteers, interns, community volunteers — presented their proposed circus acts. Schumann typically reviews and critiques the sketches.Most of the acts had a whimsical tone. A man imitating a bee (collapsing bee colonies the inspiration) did a frenetic waggle around a cardboard city that transformed itself into a tangle of dancing urbanites. An orca ambushed yachting billionaire puppets. When somber-looking tree figures appeared with a narrator reading facts about boreal forests versus the more flammable monoculture ones burning in nearby Canada, Schumann became agitated.One of the circus performances.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“It’s too cliché, something everyone already knows,” he shouted. “You have to stop using so many words and solve things puppetry-wise.” Then he jumped to his feet and started moving people and puppets around. He had puppeteers throw the trees and then dance with them, causing some confusion.“It’s what you do, not what you say,” he said. “It’s puppetry, not preaching.”He told them he would return in a half-hour to see a revision. Then, as dinnertime approached, he excused himself to help the kitchen staff make potato pancakes — a recipe from his war-torn childhood.With admirable control, the puppeteers discussed how to rework their savaged piece, each giving the others time to suggest solutions. It was a utopian vision of collaboration, agile and practical — and typical of how the company functions.“Peter has a strong directional voice,” said Ziggy Bird, 26, a company member who took notice of Schumann’s work in a theater history class at Temple University. “It’s never personal and some of the most beautiful moments come from frustration, which can be a kick in the pants.”Bread and Puppet Theater performs all over the world, and travels domestically on a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesArt inside the bus, which reiterates Schumann’s uncompromising faith in what he calls “Cheap Art.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesVisitors tour a makeshift gallery featuring Schumann’s bedsheet paintings.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Schools of art are teaching solo enterprises, but what people do here is the opposite — they collaborate,” Schumann said while smoking a cigar, drinking a can of beer and stirring a vat of potato pancake batter to be fried on an outdoor stovetop. This collaborative process has birthed companies far beyond Vermont, including Papermoon Puppet Theater in Indonesia, Y No Había Luz in Puerto Rico and Great Small Works in New York City.“It’s a way of making art and living with a strong level of engagement and concern,” said Clare Dolan, a puppeteer and a Bread and Puppet Theater board member who assists Schumann. She was preparing a circus act about the sending of cluster bombs to Ukraine. “There are incredible ripples that come from Peter that show up in theaters, parades and art-making around the world.”John Bell, the board’s president and a professor who runs the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, has been with the company since 1973, around the time it relocated to Vermont from New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, first to Goddard College and then to the land in Glover.“In a way Bread and Puppet is an art project of Peter’s and we are only here to help him realize it,” he said. “So we don’t know what will happen once he’s gone, especially because he believes in responding to the present.” While Schumann is “dealing with being an older person these days,” Bell added, the moment he starts working, his pace accelerates.That seems an understatement.At the dress rehearsal on Saturday for the circus (canceled the next day because of a rainstorm that flooded Vermont) Schumann aggressively finessed the burning forest act and others. Later he performed in an indoor show billed as a mass, “Idiots of the World Unite Against the Idiot System”; it was a good-natured critique of everything from “the empire’s false sense of freedom” to a highway system that kills wild animals. He fiddled a hybrid violin and trumpet while making an abstract speech and then led the cast of 30 in an exasperated “Aaaagh.”“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral,” Schumann said. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter that a quartet performed a Beethoven fugue.Done listening, he drove his Subaru wagon up a dirt road to a studio to finish one of his “Heart of the Matter” paintings.“He’s always had a manic creative energy and right now he’s been working with wild abandon, trying to squeeze it all in,” Max Schumann observed. “When our mother passed away, his grief was intense, but the work helped keep him alive.”In fact, when Elka Schumann died, the circus and pageant carried on the same weekend.Now Schumann lives without the life partner who helped make many things work at Bread and Puppet. He thinks about her often and visits the memorial he made to her in his pine forest — a sculptural relief of a couple embraced. At night he sometimes sits on his porch listening to the parties down on his farm, pleased about what he and his wife have inspired and sustained. Sometimes he joins in, dancing with abandon.“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral, and I’ve already had a stroke and a second is probably on the way,” he said as he painted with a steady hand. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”He put the last paint stroke on his recycled bedsheet and stepped away.“OK, this series is finished,” he said. “Now I can go on to what’s next.” More

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      After 16 Years in ‘Hadestown,’ Anaïs Mitchell Emerges With a New Album

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      The singer-songwriter fully plunged into her acclaimed theater project. Since then, her life changed wildly — and she recaptured the desire to record her own music.BRISTOL, Vt. — Eight years ago, shortly before the birth of her first child, the musician Anaïs Mitchell was instructed in a hypnobirthing class to envision her “happy place,” and was flooded with a sense memory from her rural Vermont childhood.She was in her grandparents’ house, which her father helped build, “laying on the carpeted floor in a sunbeam coming through the sliding glass door,” she recalled. Something fragrant was cooking on the stove. Her grandmother quilted while young Anaïs stenciled, crafted, or, later, scribbled lines that would become the basis of her earliest songs.In early January, a now 40-year-old Mitchell stood in that same living room, taking in the house’s rich history. Her wide blue eyes smudged with dark liner, she wore a flannel button-down and a Brooklyn Nets beanie, not an expression of fandom so much as a sartorial homage to the city she used to call home.In the decades since that childhood memory, she’s become an accomplished singer-songwriter and a force behind one of the most successful and celebrated Broadway musicals of the past few years, the eight-time Tony-winning hit “Hadestown.” By this time next year, Mitchell hopes to be living in this house with her husband and children, bringing up her two daughters on the very same family farm on which she was raised.“It’s intense to go home,” she said. “I know everyone; it’s a small town.” When she runs into people she has known her whole life, she admitted, it can be easy to revert to her childhood self. “I was a little scared to move back for that reason,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not the thing you should do.”In some sense, leaving Brooklyn for Vermont was a practical choice: Mitchell was nine months pregnant with her second child when Covid-19 hit New York. “One day I pulled our older kid out of school and the next day we bought a car,” she said. “And then the next day Broadway closed and I was like, we’re leaving. We drove to Vermont and the baby was born a week later at my parents’ farm.”It’s in many ways an ordinary story — how many city-dwellers fled to the country? — but her telling has the narrative beats of an epic myth. In that way, it feels like an Anaïs Mitchell song.Foreground from left, Eva Noblezada, Andre De Shields and Amber Gray in “Hadestown,” which opened on Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tonys.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There’s something in the way her ideas connect and always come back around,” said Josh Kaufman, the musician and producer who plays with Mitchell in the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman. “She has a very lived-in knowledge of traditional music and folk songs. But as a human she’s also incredibly in-the-moment, which allows her to anchor everything in the present.”Once a prolific solo artist, it’s been nearly a decade since Mitchell released music under her own name. But on Jan. 28, she’s returning with a self-titled album, produced by Kaufman — a collection of the most personal songs she has ever released. She sometimes attempted to write her own music during those long, busy years of working on “Hadestown,” but she ultimately “felt like I was cheating on it if I did anything else.”“I’m so proud of what we made and there was so much joy in the making of it,” she added, “but it was also an unsustainable way of living, that level of stress.”Adapted from a humble, low-budget community theater project she debuted in Montpelier in 2006, “Hadestown” brought the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into conversation with such modern phenomena as capitalism, climate change and New Orleans-style jazz.In 2010, Mitchell released a concept album called “Hadestown,” featuring songs from the initial Vermont theater production sung by some of her folk peers: Justin Vernon of Bon Iver voiced Orpheus, Ani DiFranco was Persephone. But Mitchell still dreamed of adapting a more ambitious stage production.“Anaïs is the most specific writer I’ve ever encountered,” the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin said in a phone interview. “So often the process of creating can seem really abstract,” she added. “What is very beautiful about Anaïs is that she lives very openly in the process of turning over words and images, feeling them around in her mouth and on her guitar.”When “Hadestown” opened at the Walter Kerr Theater in April 2019 (taking over for “Springsteen on Broadway”), Mitchell became just the fourth woman to compose the music, lyrics and book of a Broadway musical. The moment was a turning point in her journey with a project she’d been living with for 13 long years. But there comes a time in a show’s life when even the most involved writer must find a new space.“There was a funny moment that happened as soon as the show opened on Broadway, where suddenly I didn’t have a home in the theater anymore,” Mitchell said when we first met up in Manhattan in the courtyard of the Standard Hotel last November. “Literally: It used to be, this is my seat, this is where I go play guitar in the stairwell. And then suddenly the audience is there and there’s nowhere for me.”But this necessary step back from “Hadestown” finally gave her the opportunity to reconnect with the music world from which she’d long been absent, and return to her own, more intimate form of songwriting.“Hadestown” and her stirring 2012 album “Young Man in America” involved a lot of “dressing up in costumes, getting access to some kind of larger-than-life feelings and language, like, ‘I’m the king of the Underworld,’” she said, laughing for a moment as she did her best Hades impression. “I do really enjoy that. But these songs are all me, the stories are my stories. That feels very different.”“A songwriter is kind of a songwright,” Mitchell said. “It’s like building a house that other people will inhabit.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesTHOUGH SHE IS not quite at the level of Ben, Jerry or Bernie, Mitchell is certifiably Vermont Famous — the sort of New Englander who gets recognized in hushed tones at folk festivals and farmers’ markets. Her hair is shaggy and dyed darker than the blonde of her “Hadestown” days, and she speaks in a chiming voice that often sounds innocently wonder-struck, before a joke or a playful bit of profanity suddenly brings it back down to earth.Behind the wheel of her salt-kissed Chrysler Pacifica in January, she pointed out local landmarks on the 15-minute drive between the house she is renting in Bristol and her parents’ farm: her high school; a sign for a local “radical puppetry” company; a humorously and undeniably phallic-shaped headstone that has always made her laugh (“Who chose that?”).Mitchell describes her parents as “hippies, back-to-the-landers.” In the late 1960s, her father, Don, scored a book deal when he was still a Swarthmore undergraduate, for a semi-autobiographical hitchhiking novel he’d written called “Thumb Tripping.” He sold the movie rights, moved to Los Angeles with his young wife, Cheryl, and wrote the screenplay to a pulpy, “Easy Rider”-era film adaptation of his book. He cashed out in the early 1970s and used his Hollywood earnings to buy a 130-acre farm in Vermont’s Champlain Valley.For most of Anaïs’s childhood, her entire family lived on the property, including her grandparents in that wooden house her father helped build for them. Cheryl opposed television, so young Anaïs would sneak over to her grandparents’ place whenever she wanted to watch; she has fond and uncommonly subversive memories of the nightly news with Dan Rather. She rode horses, roamed the woods with her older brother and, like her namesake Anaïs Nin, journaled prolifically.She found those old diaries recently in a box in her grandparents’ house, and the experience inspired “Revenant,” a heartfelt, acoustic-guitar-driven song on the new album that finds her extending a mature grace to her younger self: “Suddenly I saw you there, runny-eyed in a wooden chair/Ran outside to hide your face in the wild Queen Anne’s lace,” she sings. “Come and let me hold you in my arms/Come and get my shoulder wet and warm.”Mitchell went to Middlebury College, and supported herself as a figure model for art classes. “I was always very comfortable nude because no one can see us here, so everyone would skinny-dip,” she said on the secluded farm. When she was 19, one of those gigs led to the sort of meet-cute that might appear in an R-rated comedy: Noah Hahn, a student in one of the classes, turned out to be the man she would marry.They were apart quite a bit in the early years of their relationship, as Mitchell was paying her dues on the road as an aspiring singer-songwriter. But — as she proposes on the new album’s ode to an artist’s muse, “Bright Star” — sometimes longing and distance can bear unexpected fruit. She was driving home alone from a show one night, hoping Noah was waiting up for her, when the melody and a few lyrics of what would become the first “Hadestown” song came to her out of the blue:“Wait for me, I’m coming, in my garters and pearls/With what melody did you barter me from the wicked underworld?”Mitchell and the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin. “Anaïs is the most specific writer I’ve ever encountered,” Chavkin said.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesLIKE THE LONG gestating “Hadestown” (Chavkin compares the pace at which Mitchell works to “watching a tree grow, because it’s so deep, so imperceptible”), one of the most affecting songs on Mitchell’s new album took years to finish writing.“Little Big Girl” is partially about the tension she experienced returning to her hometown, appearing to the outside world as a grown and accomplished woman while, internally, still feeling like that same scrappy little Anaïs she was years ago. But the song is roomy enough to tap into a more universal sentiment — how strange it is that we all “keep on getting older” while still feeling “just like a kid.” Or, more specifically, that the world treats you as an ever-aging woman when you sometimes feel as defenseless as a little girl.“There’s so much art made by people in their 20s about the ups and downs of your love life,” Mitchell said. “I’ve been there and I love that music. It’s very deep and real. But there’s also all these other elements of being the age I am now, and being a mom, and relocating myself in the world and in my family. I want to be able to write about that stuff, too.”Mitchell knows this kind of work can be too easily dismissed as “culturally irrelevant mom art,” as she put it. But the remarkable specificity of her songcraft and the expansive, almost mythic scope she brings to her human experience as a wife, mother and 40-something woman demand to be taken seriously.“On her other records, it’s someone else’s epic poem that she’s running through her own beautiful sense of language and harmony,” Kaufman said. “On this one, she’s looking back like, ‘I have my own epic poem here. There’s these people, these relatives, my kids, my long relationship with my husband, my long relationship with my songwriting.’ It’s a self-portrait, but like any compelling self-portrait it’s vulnerable enough that you almost feel like you’re looking in a mirror. It resonates deeply because it’s so honest.”Ideally, Mitchell said, “the song could live on without you.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesFOR ONE NIGHT in November 2021, Mitchell once again had a designated seat in the theater when she attended the reopening of “Hadestown” following its pandemic closure. “It just made me miss the process of working on that show so much,” she said later. “I spent the first act of the show spinning wheels in my head like, ‘What musical could I write next? I need another story!’” She is content for now to focus on her work as a solo artist and with Bonny Light Horseman, though the thought of never writing another stage show after “Hadestown” would be like if she “went to grad school and then didn’t use the degree.”Mitchell doesn’t see such a clear delineation between the two artistic worlds she straddles, though. “I do think there’s a common denominator with writing for the theater and writing songs,” she said. “Ideally, the song could live on without you. You don’t have to sing it, someone else could sing it. I love that. Someone singing it at their wedding, or at a funeral, or at a protest.”She reached for a bit of lingual antiquity and metaphor that tracks closely to her own move to Vermont. “You know how you spell playwright as playwright, like you’re building or constructing something?” she asked. “A songwriter is kind of a songwright. It’s like building a house that other people will inhabit.” More

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      Getting to Know You, Again

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGetting to Know You, AgainThe pandemic has sent many people back to their parents’ homes, giving both generations new insight and a chance at a different kind of relationship.Before the pandemic, the comedian Nikki Glaser, left, pitched a show about moving back in with her parents, E.J. and Julie Glaser, as an adult. The pandemic made what seemed like an unlikely scenario into a reality.   Credit…Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesFeb. 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETPatricia Mitchell was newly widowed, still grieving and adjusting to living alone after 50 years of marriage, when her daughter, Emily Mitchell-Marell, called last March. It was the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns. Ms. Mitchell-Marell had recently given birth to a baby girl. She also had a 4-year-old son, and the schools in Brooklyn, where she lives, had been closed.Ms. Mitchell, a 74-year-old retired family therapist, heard the stress and panic in her daughter’s voice. “Having a baby, a job, a son and a pandemic was completely overwhelming to her,” she said. “Emily asked to come here.”And so, in the kind of surprising life upheaval the pandemic has made almost commonplace, Ms. Mitchell’s youngest daughter, her son-in-law and two grandchildren moved into her rambling old house outside Woodstock, N.Y. Eleven months later, the family is still there, eating dinner together every night and amazed to be doing so.“I have not spent this kind of time with Emily in 20 years,” Ms. Mitchell said. Her tone was that of someone who had received a complicated gift.For Patricia Mitchell, living with her granddaughter, Vera, has been “a real treat.”Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesLast July, a remarkable survey by the Pew Research Center found that more than half of people between the ages of 18 and 29 were living with their parents. Not since the Great Depression had so many adult children dwelled at home. It wasn’t only young adults, either. Job losses, school closings or other pandemic-induced reasons have driven many older children like Ms. Mitchell-Marell, who is 40, back to the nest.Because the young dominate the public’s attention, and because they own the bully pulpit of social media, the demographic phenomenon has been told largely from their viewpoint. The consensus attitude was perhaps best expressed by the young woman who made a TikTok set to the tune of “New York” by Alicia Keys, describing her quarantine with her mom and dad in the ’burbs. Sample lyric: “My parents won’t let me use their car/My friends all live too far/Twenty-five minutes from Dallas, Dallas, DALL-ASSSSSS!!!!!!!!”But as a middle-aged woman named Randi Cohen, whose 30-year-old daughter moved home to Columbus, Ohio, last spring, said, in what sounded like mild aggrievement, “There is another side to all of this.” Ah, yes, the side that doesn’t express themselves on TikTok.Imagine you have dutifully raised your children and released them into the world, growing accustomed to infrequent visits around the holidays, and then suddenly they’re back, a decade or more later, sleeping in their old bedrooms and sacking the fridge. It’s the sort of whiplash plot Hollywood movies are built on. Yet for millions of parents during the pandemic, it became a reality.Whether it played as a domestic comedy or psychological thriller depends on individual family dynamics. But every parent-child relationship is, to varying degrees, an emotional minefield. Navigating it successfully only grows harder when the child living in your house is all grown up: How do you make a 30-year-old pick up his dirty laundry?Getting ReacquaintedPatricia Mitchell, far right, who was recently widowed, finds herself living with her daughter, Emily, her son-in-law, Ben, and her grandchildren, Maximus and Vera.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesReflecting on her experience over the past year, Ms. Mitchell expressed both gratitude and fatigue. She’s had the chance to observe, up close, her daughter’s happy marriage and mature approach toward work and motherhood, which has been gratifying as a parent. Helping raise her granddaughter from birth has been “really a treat,” and a welcome distraction from her grief and loneliness. Her son-in-law became the man of the house, doing chores and repairs.But living in a crowded, active, child-centered household again at her age can be exhausting. “There’s more food shopping and dishes and cleaning and laundry,” Ms. Mitchell said. “The noise level. The house wakes up very early. The level of activity is a bit shocking to my system, if you want to know the truth.”Parents have had to make adjustments of all kinds, as they welcome back children whose lives may have diverged widely from their own, and of which they may have only a vague idea. Empty nesters, they’ve been plunged back into hands-on parenting and asked to fulfill seemingly exotic requests.“He has a trainer that he works with and this trainer also has a specific diet” for him, said Janet Schaffler, 65, about her 34-year-old son, Kyle, who lives in Manhattan and came home to Indianapolis for two months at the start of the pandemic, and then again for weekslong stretches. Ms. Schaffler, who handles the cooking and shopping, found herself running what amounted to an Equinox juice bar out of her kitchen.“Everything had to be weighed. It was high protein, no bad carbs,” she said. “I needed to go to Trader Joe’s to buy this, another supermarket for that,” on top of shopping and cooking for herself and her husband. “Making sure everyone had what they needed, I never had any rest.”Ms. Cohen discovered that her daughter, Hannah Berkeley Cohen, while living in Cuba as a freelance journalist and tour guide, had evidently became a gourmet, because back home in Ohio, she now objected to her parents’ more simple meals.“She comes in and she’s a foodie and she’s appalled by what we eat. We don’t spend an hour preparing food and adding sauces because that’s what she and her boyfriend do,” Ms. Cohen said. “We had some talks about, ‘This is how we live. If you want to make dinner for us, that’s lovely.’”Bill Vien, 58, welcomed his daughter and son, both in their 20s, back home to Vermont for several months last year. His daughter, Corinne, co-hosts, “Two Girls One Ghost,” apodcast about ghosts and the paranormal. Mr. Vien and his wife were asked to maintain complete silence — no talking, no TV, not even shoes on the hardwood floors — while she recorded for three hours twice a week.“My wife never lets laundry get ahead of her,” Mr. Vien said. “Of course, we have one of those washers and dryers that make a chime.”Diane Camara welcomed her son, Jared Alexander, back home after his theater tour was canceled.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesFor Diane Camara, whose 25-year-old son, Jared Alexander, an actor and writer, moved back into her home in Stratford, Conn., after the show he was scheduled to perform in was canceled, the adjustment was more internal, one of perception.“When he came back, I went into mom mode. I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m taking care of you. What do you have to worry about, you’re just a kid,’” Ms. Camara, 50, said. “It took me a minute to realize, ‘No, he’s an adult. And he’s going through it just like I’m going through it. And in some ways worse than me. He’s the one displaced, he lost his tour.”A Gift of TimeIndeed, these were not like the carefree stays of a summer home from college. Nor were they brief visits with the pressure release valve of a known end date. The children returned during a year of health risks, economic ruin and social and political upheaval, and with their own careers and adult responsibilities to manage through a global pandemic that has stretched on without end.But once the shock of events wore off and everyone found a routine, many parents said they were brought closer to their grown children. For the first time in years, and with a different feeling, there were family dinners, game nights, watching TV together, exchanging ideas as mature adults.“We drink a glass of wine and talk. We sit and watch movies,” Ms. Cohen, whose daughter remains at home, said. “We’ve never done that before. She can be a girlie girl, so she does my nails. It is lovely spending time with her.”Ms. Camara and Mr. Alexander in the garden they planted together last summer.Credit…Jared AlexanderLast summer, Ms. Camara and her son planted a flower garden in her backyard, the first garden for both of them. “We just got out there. We worked together as a team really well,” Ms. Camara said.A reluctant gardener initially, Mr. Alexander said watering the flowers and watching them slowly grow became a way to not only bond with his mother but come to terms with his interrupted life. He wrote an essay about the experience for a website.“It helped me adjust,” he said. “This isn’t going to be two weeks, two months. It’s going to be awhile. It wound up turning into something special.”There was, for parents, the added marvel of really seeing who their children had become as adults. Back under the same roof, they had a window into their children’s work and social lives and relationships.Leroy Rutherford has watched his daughter, Chrissy, start a business while back home. “That was nice seeing her start up something of her own,” he said.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesLeroy Rutherford, 72, watched his daughter, Chrissy Rutherford, start a brand consultancy out of her childhood bedroom in Bedford, N.Y., where she’s been staying since giving up her apartment in Manhattan last April. He may complain about the dirty dishes Ms. Rutherford leaves in the sink, but he admires her work ethic. “She gets up from 8 in the morning and starts working. And 7 or 8 at night, she’s still on her phone or her computer,” Mr. Rutherford said. “That was nice seeing her start up something of her own.”Ms. Schaffler, the mother in Indianapolis, concurred. “You always think they’re never going to be able to grow up and cope by themselves,” she said. “Well, he can and he has. Just listening to him on his work calls. Not eavesdropping but just listening. He’s sounding just like his dad now. I could appreciate and be quite proud of that.”More than anything, there was time. Precious, unexpected time. In the summer months, Mr. Vien, his wife and two children would stop working each day and have lunch together on the deck. He got to watch his son and daughter, four years apart and usually living on opposite coasts, develop a tighter relationship over their stay. His daughter had gone off to college in California at 17 and stayed there during breaks to do internships, and Mr. Vien and his wife had felt time with her had been “stolen.” The pandemic gave it back.Shannon Holtzman, whose grown daughters, Carolyn and Larkin, both returned home to New Orleans for several months (Carolyn remains there), echoed the sentiment. “I regret the pandemic and wish it had never happened,” Ms. Holtzman said. “But for us, this has been a gift. We’ll likely never have this time again.”She marveled aloud, “This was the first birthday of mine where I had both daughters home since 2004.”The Stuff of Comedy“I thought this would destroy us,” said Nikki Glaser of moving back in with her parents, E.J. and Julie Glaser. The opposite has been true.Credit…Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesIf there could be a poster family for quarantining together during the pandemic, it would be the Glasers — that is, Nikki Glaser, a 36-year-old stand-up comedian and actress, and her parents, E.J. and Julie Glaser. When the pandemic struck, Ms. Glaser was in Los Angeles on a work trip. She had invited her parents along, and so she decided not to return to her New York apartment but to go back with them to her childhood home, in St. Louis. As the pandemic grew worse and her comedy gigs and other projects were canceled, she stayed. “I thought this would destroy us, me living there for 10 months,” she said. “But I didn’t want to leave.”Ms. Glaser has turned being back in her Midwestern childhood home as a single woman and famous person into an extended bit. In TV interviews, like one with Conan O’Brien last May, she appeared on Zoom from her father’s home office. When she guest-hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live!, in July, she booked her parents as the house band, cutting to them in their living room (Mr. Glaser plays acoustic guitar and Mrs. Glaser sings). A show Ms. Glaser had been writing before the pandemic, in which she gets canceled by the internet and has to move back home to St. Louis — “Which used to be some, like, kind of sci-fi thing,” she told Mr. O’Brien — became her lived experience. Meanwhile, her parents have become minor celebrities through their appearances on TV and on her social media channels.“I have 16,000 followers on Instagram,” Mr. Glaser said.His wife chimed in, “He had two before this.”More important, the couple have reconnected with their daughter, who for years saw her family infrequently as she built her comedy career on the coasts. “I’ve tried to get her to sing with me ever since she was a small child,” Mr. Glaser said. “She started learning guitar and we played and sang together a lot during the last few months.”After 10 months living with her parents, Ms. Glaser recently moved out and rented her own apartment again — in St. Louis. Nikki Glaser in a stand-up performance.Credit…Ben Vogelsang“I always argued that it was for the best,” Ms. Glaser said about choosing to live away from home. “This year has made me reflect upon what actually makes me happy. I love my family and I love being around them.”Shifting RelationshipsAs the pandemic stretches on, some parents, including Ms. Mitchell, continue to house their grown children. Her newborn granddaughter is nearly one, and she and Ms. Mitchell-Marell are closer than ever. In fact, Ms. Mitchell-Marell and her husband are considering relocating to the Hudson Valley. “I do want to be near her now in a way that wasn’t as important to me,” Ms. Mitchell-Marell said. “And I don’t want to separate her and my baby.”Said Ms. Mitchell, “They wouldn’t have come back without the pandemic. I do think they’re going to find a place in the valley. And be nearby. And that will be very great.” Other parents are empty nesters again.Marilyn LaMonica, 76 and a psychoanalyst, welcomed her 48-year-old son, daughter-in-law and 5-year-old grandson into the Brooklyn house she shares with her husband for three months last spring.At first, to be together seemed like a fantasy fulfilled, a return to the large Italian family of her childhood. But between cooking for five people three times a day, worrying about her loved ones getting the virus and balancing the competing needs of everyone in the house, the experience was something more complicated. Ms. LaMonica called those months “a blur” and “a bundle of mixed feelings,” summing up how other parents said they felt.And yet, when it was over, and her son and his family returned to their Manhattan apartment, Ms. LaMonica admitted to a sense of sadness, as if she were letting her child go all over again.“It’s not rational,” she said. “But I felt a very deep sense of loss.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More