Anohni’s Message: To Save the World, We’ll Have to Forgive Ourselves

The artist talks about her new album, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, which explicitly aligns her with the American protest-music tradition.

One of the most uncompromising artists of the 21st century, Anohni Hegarty makes gorgeous music to warn humankind of its demise. Whether with gentle orchestration on the classic 2005 album I Am a Bird Now or with electronic beats on the 2016 release Hopelessness, her quavering voice has prophesied the death of herself, our species, and our planet with haunting, almost paralyzing, clarity. A writer of manifestos who can boast of an Oscar nomination and a spot on Rolling Stone’s list of the top 200 singers of all time, she commands a sense of gravitas more common to Nobel laureates than working musicians.  

Now, on her band’s new album, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, she explicitly situates herself within the American protest-music tradition. The songs’ shuffling rhythms and searching refrains recall Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, and other singers of the civil-rights struggle. Some of the lyrics, such as the one that titles the opening track, “It Must Change,” could be slogans chanted at a march. The album cover is a photo of Marsha P. Johnson, the activist who helped consolidate the queer liberation movement and inspired the name of Anohni’s band, the Johnsons. (Her image is, among other things, a reminder that Anohni has been singing about her own transgender identity since long before trans rights were a mainstream concern.)

Although lovely, these new songs still have a gruesome honesty. “Scapegoat” envisions a hate crime from the point of view of the criminal: “I can use you like a toilet / I can punch you / And take all of my hate / Into your body.” On “Why Am I Alive Now?,” she paints an all-too-recognizable hellscape of smoky skies and dying animals, lamenting, “I don’t want to be witness.” What course of action are these bleak visions meant to inspire? I wanted to speak with her to understand.

As it turns out, interviewing Anohni was as intense an experience as listening to her music. After she greeted me in a giggly and friendly manner, her speech turned halting. Each answer was painstakingly produced and employed custom terminology: Musical styles were “technology”; tolerance was the “mandate of care.” She repeatedly paused and asked to revise her thoughts, and at times seemed to be speaking through tears. At the end of the conversation, the spell broke and she was back to conviviality. “Sorry if I got a little—I don’t know what I got,” she said before we ended the call. I felt drained but reassured: Within this viscerally fearful music lies a rigorous theory of how we all might survive.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Spencer Kornhaber: Is the title of “It Must Change” a command, telling people to change? Or is it a statement of fact: Inevitably, things change.

Anohni: It was a feeling in me. It’s forcing a space in one’s imagination to exist. I watched society go from the ’90s, where people were in denial about the gravity of environmental changes that we were already experiencing, to within 10 years just having this resigned attitude about it. That space in our imaginations—why was it suffocated?

It’s probably partly because people feel so disempowered. We’ve all been forced into these complicitous stress positions in relationship to consumerism, where it’s impossible to even eat food without doing harm. It’s hard, when we’re facing so much shame and guilt about our own complicity as consumers, to imagine broader change.

Kornhaber: Your last album was Hopelessness, and it sat in that feeling of hopelessness. The vibe this time is a little different. Does that reflect you gaining hope or just changing how you’re expressing yourself?

Anohni: Hopelessness was probably the most strategically executed record I made. I set out to disrupt people’s assumptions about what my voice was for. It was no longer a voice of solace or comfort. I wanted to embody complicated conversations about my own complicity.

But what was interesting about Hopelessness is that as much as I thought I was doing this battle cry, attempting to break down denial, the people who cared were people that felt the same way I did but appreciated someone singing their thoughts. It’s nice to hear someone sing “I don’t want to be a part of this drone bombing campaign that’s taking the lives in a part of the world that I don’t even understand.”

Singing is a different channel of communication. It comes from the spirit. It’s ancient, and it bypasses a lot of bullshit. When you put really direct, clear words or ideas onto those streams of sound, they can reach into a different part of you. I mean, that’s what Marvin Gaye did with What’s Going On. He took all that technology of music and then he weaponized it with a plain-speaking script describing life as he saw it. It wasn’t just one song. It was an accumulation of songs that systematically identified issue after issue. And it culminated in a single vision that comprised a worldview. It’s powerful.

And ironically, for all the people saying Hopelessness is so hopeless, my desire was to use more vigorous language to talk about how I actually felt. The music I was making was too pastoral. It wasn’t responding to the times. It wasn’t sufficiently vigorous. And that was why I did Hopelessness. It wasn’t me going off and dillydallying with classical musicians.

[Read: Drones, global warming, and other excellent topics for pop songs]

Kornhaber: Where does this new album land in relation to that feeling?

Anohni: This record came about as an impulse. I contacted my label during COVID and said, “I’d like to make a ‘blue-eyed soul’ record.” Blue-eyed soul is obviously a very complicated, problematic idea. And yet, it’s all wrapped up in the truth about where my voice comes from.

Why, as a 10-year-old, was I listening to New Wave singers like Boy George and Alison Moyet, who were singing with these intensely soulful, evocative voices in American accents? I was sitting by the radio as a child in the South of England hearing these vocalists express a kind of knowledge that I didn’t see in evidence anywhere else in the society that I was part of. Here was this oasis of gracious resilience, embodied in the form of a 20-year-old Irish London queen named Boy George, singing like a 50-year-old Black, American woman. It was the beginning of an outpouring of white, English voices that were founded on the soulful technology of Black, American music from the ’50s and ’60s. The British kids grabbed it like a life raft, and I find myself wondering why.

The class system in the U.K. was a guillotine. And I’m imagining kids from the suburbs of London going to see concerts by Otis Redding or sitting around listening to Nina Simone. It’s like an enlightenment. Children hear these voices that are expressing a knowledge of how to navigate untenable circumstances with grace, resilience, and joy. And their fucking minds are blown. That technology was taken up and imitated across generations.

Kornhaber: As you said, this is such a tricky and problematic tradition. How do you reckon with the appropriation discourse?

Anohni: I am from a naive generation. I mean, Culture Club: Boy George was an effeminate queen in Liz Taylor makeup wearing Hasidic outfits—with a bassist descended from the islands, a Jewish drummer, and a white guy with blond hair on guitar—singing with the voice of, like, Millie Jackson. It’s like, what is that? To me, that’s cultural biodiversity. Now we would call it a naive vision of multiculturalism as urban paradise. And that was what I was raised on. We would go to the city hoping to see everyone who was different, and that was where I felt safe. Because if everyone was different, then I was normal.

The whole conversation about appropriation—it’s real. It’s all real. And the first part of it is: Let me name where I come from. There’s no way for me to justify it. I’m just trying to be honest about where my voice technology comes from. And also say “thank you,” because this technology saved my life.

Kornhaber: This reminds me of the Marsha P. Johnson album cover. On Instagram, you wrote about how in the past six years, she has finally been recognized “as the Rosa Parks of the trans and gay Civil rights movements.” Why do you think this recognition has arrived in the past six years?

Anohni: Because there’s a Netflix movie.

Kornhaber: It’s as simple as that?

Anohni: Yeah, it’s as simple as that.

Kornhaber: Do you think that instances of cultural representation of queer and trans people make a substantive difference? Does it matter to you that there has been a trans singer on the American pop charts?

Anohni: Of course it matters to me. I’m thrilled that there’s a trans singer in the pop charts, but it has very little bearing on the safety of normal people’s lives, or whether they’re being preyed upon in the media, in the schoolyard, or in their places of work, or whether they’re even allowed to get jobs.

Representation is useful, but the mandate of care waxes and wanes depending on the conditions that societies are undergoing. There could have been times in the ’70s where gay people were a lot safer, generally speaking, than they are now. It’s not like this inexorable progress. That’s a fantasy. Things can get worse, and they do, and just because there’s a trans pop star doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be coming with pitchforks.

And that’s what people are being incited to do—by people that don’t give a shit about trans people. All they care about doing is making sure that no one gets themselves together to have a broader conversation about the fact that malevolent figures are making decisions that are operating like ushers of death into all of our communities. They don’t want us to have that conversation, and that’s why they’ve reanimated a loathing for gay people and trans people, and miraculously managed to reinvigorate a fantasy that women shouldn’t have a right to govern their own bodies. It’s a disease. We’re unwell. And that’s actually a message of hope.

Kornhaber: How so?

Anohni: Because if we can’t acknowledge what’s really happening, we’re never, ever gonna be able to shift our trajectory. The difference between this record and the last record is that I’m trying to introduce, in my own life, a sense of mercy and self-forgiveness in this conversation about complicity. We’re gonna need some tenderness if we’re going to be able to withstand the truth about who we are, and what we’ve done, and where we’re headed. We’re going to have to find ways to forgive ourselves.

But that’s a very adult challenge. And most of us are floundering in infantile, reactionary responses to the current moment. The adult response will be to find gracious strength and resilience—the same kind of strength and resilience that I saw modeled in those soul songs.

Kornhaber: The song “Why Am I Alive Now?” makes me wonder whether there are other eras that you wish you had been in, or that you escape to in your mind.

Anohni: In my way of dreaming about things, all the different eyes of the past are looking through our eyes. And I imagine that if I dream deeply enough, I’ll be able to hear the thoughts of coral reefs that I was once a part of.

There’s a tremendous amount of suffering right now on the planet. We’ve managed to keep it out of sight as, quote, “first world” consumers, but you don’t have to dig very deep to imagine the hurting hands through which most of the nourishment we suck on has passed through. Like foods, or animal products, or plastic wrappings. So “Why Am I Alive Now?” is just asking a question from a place of porous sensitivity to a broader condition of hurting that permeates the material world. How did it come to be that this was the window through which my eyes would shine? And how do I manage it?

The thing about “Why Am I Alive Now?” that I love is that the music is very joyful and abundant and complex. Hopelessness isn’t a fact. Hope isn’t a fact. It’s just a feeling. And so there’s this narrative, the human narrative, that’s preoccupied with suffering, and then there’s this environment that’s still in process. That’s a big part of the structure of the song, the message of that song.