ANOHNI and the Johnsons take an intimate look at what’s really happening
The New York City–based artist takes an unflinching look at grief, loss, and ecological collapse
ANOHNI’s music bridges the disconnect between what is happening in the world and what we do about it.
ANOHNI and the Johnsons perform at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on October 5 at 8 pm; AHNONI will also appear in conversation with Naomi Klein at the Chan Centre’s Telus Studio Theatre on October 4 at 2 pm
ANOHNI DOESN’T DO small talk.
Okay, maybe that’s not exactly fair. The singer and main songwriter of ANOHNI and the Johnsons is perfectly capable of exchanging pleasantries. It’s just that when the conversation takes a turn towards the deep—and it invariably does—she very quickly demonstrates that her intellect is as powerful an instrument as her celebrated voice.
Case in point: when Stir asks why the Johnsons’ current tour has been christened It’s Time to Feel What’s Really Happening, the answer suggests that serious intent lies behind the name.
“I think as a singer, my job is to use different neural pathways to understand what’s going on around me,” ANOHNI says on a Zoom call from New York City, where she lives. “You know, singing is a different way of thinking or speaking about what’s going on, and it reaches into people in a different way, in an almost ionic way. It’s an ancient way of communicating that combines feeling and intuition with thoughts and ideas and physical reality.”
The notion of feeling what’s really happening, she says, arises from the disconnect between what we can perceive all too clearly—the fact that humanity is wreaking havoc on the natural world, for example—and what we actually do about it, i.e. nothing much.
“In order for us to ever get to a point where we might ever even hope to create the change that’s going to be necessary to shift our trajectory as a deeply suicidal species, we’re going to need to bridge this dissociative gap between what we feel and see is happening around us and what we’re continuing to do,” she says.
ANOHNI has explored this gap in her music at least as far back as 2015, when she released “4 Degrees”. The first single from a solo LP called Hopelessness, the song finds its author despairing in the face of global warming, while simultaneously acknowledging her own impact on the climate, all set to a hammering martial beat and dramatic synth lines.
The latest ANOHNI and the Johnsons single, “Breaking”, is built on a more laid-back, jazz-inflected sonic foundation, but it too includes a mournful confession of culpability: “I take and take a little more/And then I see that forest fall/And my garden was swept away.”
The band's most recent full-length album—last year’s My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross—is by no means a collection of songs exploring a single topic. The desecration of nature is indeed a theme that runs like a thread throughout the entire project, but individual songs probe loss and grief (“Can’t”), xenophobia (“Scapegoat”), and sacrifice (“You Be Free”).
On paper, that might seem like a recipe for a grim and disheartening listen, but ANOHNI and coproducer Jimmy Hogarth (the Johnsons’ guitarist) have crafted a record that veers away from the band’s signature chamber-pop aesthetic in favour of vintage soul and R&B sounds. With Nina Simone and Jimmy Scott as touchstones, ANOHNI delivers her lyrics with a buoyant intimacy that keeps the proceedings from becoming too heavy.
Things do, however, get notably weighty in conversation when Stir points out that the pressing issues of climate change and green energy seem to have taken a backseat in the current U.S. election cycle. While inflation and skyrocketing food prices are very real everyday concerns, our neighbours to the immediate south are engaged in a culture war, with women, migrants, and trans people caught in the proverbial crosshairs of a far right that has bullied its way to the centre of American politics.
ANOHNI, who is herself trans, suggests that Project 2025 is merely the latest manifestation of a centuries-old pattern of patriarchal societies preying on their most vulnerable members.
“Sating a bloodlust is a form of social control, and that’s a several-thousand-year-old story,” she says, “but when we talk about ‘what’s really happening’, what’s unique to right now is that same business-as-usual, that waxing and waning of our willingness to afford all humanity—let alone the rest of creation—any dignity is now like a smokescreen for an unprecedented collapse of biosphere.”
ANOHNI
This should all be fodder for a fascinating discussion when ANOHNI takes the stage of the Telus Studio Theatre for a dialogue with acclaimed author Naomi Klein (No Logo, The Shock Doctrine), who is also the co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice.
At the Chan Centre the following night, ANOHNI and Hogarth will be joined by cellist Julia Kent, violinists Maxim Moston and Mazz Swift, multi-instrumentalist Doug Wieselman, guitarist Leo Abrahams, pianist Gael Rakotondrabe, bassist Sam Dixon, drummer Chris Vatalaro, and dancer Johanna Constantine.
It will be a good opportunity to, well, feel what’s really happening. And even if confronting the state of the world leaves you with a sense of hopelessness, ANOHNI recommends accepting, even embracing, that feeling.
“If you’re in the hopelessness, feel it,” she advises. “Let it electrocute you. Be aware of it; that’s probably a current that’s passing through more people than just you. Let it unify you with other people who are recognizing the direness of this moment, the unprecedentedness of this moment. Don’t shy away from how you feel. Don’t let it dictate how you behave, but pay attention. Feel it. That’s called being alive. Feeling how you’re really feeling? That’s one of the greatest indications that you’re even alive.” 
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