Anohni returns to Toronto: The singer behind the Star's favourite album of 2023 discusses touring, the climate crisis and her friend Lou Reed

“This is a transformative moment,” she told me in an interview last year. “But what’s being asked of us is Olympic, to make a kind of collective shift that’s almost impossible to conceive of.”

It’s a theme that looms large this fall, as Anohni and the Johnsons tour North America for the first time in nearly 15 years, including a date at Toronto’s Massey Hall on Tuesday.

The tour comes as a bit of a surprise – when we spoke last summer, Anohni had just emerged from a years-long hiatus; she told me she was unsure if she would perform live again. It was clear that the weight of the world – from climate disasters to a rising tide of anti-trans violence – was weighing heavy on her.

16 months later, amid historic hurricanes and ongoing humanitarian crises in the Middle East – the world feels even bleaker. And yet, when I caught up with Anohni over Zoom earlier this week, she sounded remarkably fortified.

“I’m definitely more engaged than I ever imagined I would be the last time I talked to you,” she says. “It’s really unusual to be travelling around the U.S. and seeing the cities again for the first time in a long time. It’s been touching, honestly.” 

“My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross” was very well received by critics. The New Yorker named it the best album of 2023. How did it feel to finally put that record out into the world?

I was really grateful that the New Yorker recognized it, because it was kind of going slightly under the radar. And then they put up that piece and took a stand about it, which meant a lot to me because we put so much into it. You’re not supposed to really care what the press says, but these papers are a record of what happened at any particular point in time. And this record feels very much of its time. 

The reception of the record was very positive, critically, but it’s honestly my impression that – in the U.S. especially – people’s relationship to the concept of identity politics has gotten in the way of their ability to connect with my music. It seems like I’ve been marketed specifically to a very certain demographic. And now it feels like the general demographic doesn’t feel as invited to the table, which is really confusing to me because the work is mostly about the environment, through the lens of my experience.

With the way that things are painted out now, as a trans person, most people think they’re not even allowed to interact with my work unless they’re trans or queer. That wasn’t the rules 20 years ago, but it seems like that’s the rules that the media has put down now – that you have to be kind of advanced to be able to push through some preoccupation with my identity to get to the core material, which is actually talking about this stuff on a much more systemic level.

I find that a little bit depressing. But I’m just going forward in good faith. 

When we last spoke, New York City was covered in wildfire smoke. Today, the U.S. is dealing with terrifyingly strong hurricanes that experts say are caused by global warming. And yet there seems to me like there is a lack of urgency in regards to addressing the climate crisis, even as these events seem to become more common.

I know what you mean. Everyone says the same thing, and I’m hearing it everywhere I go. No one thinks things are getting better, especially now with this looming war between Israel and Iran – that could turn into a world war. This is something that for decades people have dreaded, and now it’s here and it’s barely registering on most people’s most people’s feed. It’s frightening, the extent of the disparity between what’s really going on and the way we’re holding things as a culture, as a society, especially in the United States. 

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, at all, and yet I’m a firm believer in the power of malevolent design. And I think that this system that we’re navigating now has been malevolently designed to keep us in place and to keep systems rolling forward so that extraction can continue unabated, no matter what the cost. 

(Politics today) is framed as a war of personalities or a war of identity politics, condensed into something that’s bite-sized, or manageable, something that people can get their head around. I think the idea of global cataclysm is just too much for most people to hold space for. It feels too overwhelming. People just don’t want to sit in that lobster pot for more than five seconds. They just want to take shelter and they would be right in wanting to take shelter. Unfortunately, that’s the crisis that we’re facing right now.

There’s a kind of adriftness that a lot of people seem to be experiencing – a kind of confusion and loneliness. But there are a lot of opportunities at this moment to come together, but we’re not yet taking full advantage of them. 

During our conversation, you told me that “one of the most brutal lenses is this expectation of a binary reality.” I think this really speaks to our current moment: our tendency to see the world in black and white, or to understand the world in terms of good or evil. I feel like this last year, we’ve seen the resurgence of this sort of binary worldview.

I think about it all the time, how the lens through which we’re being told to see the world is an infantilized one, when the spectral complexity of what’s actually happening is not only more of a wonder to behold, it’s also more empirically real than this sort of black and white fervor that’s driving everyone insane at this point.

Much of this is being vastly exacerbated by tech, which is dividing us and conquering us and turning us into spineless fish for them to do what they want with us, extractively-speaking – and whether they’re pushing to realize a kind of hideous climax to some Christian apocalypse or they’re pushing to suck the last oil out of the dirty tar sands, they just want us to stay out of it.

It’s not a great time. The Democrats’ platform, and even Bernie (Sanders) – who we all trust and love – are telling us to give money to an administration that’s facilitating this insanity in Israel and the surrounding countries. It’s frightening. Nothing makes sense.

A lot of people turn to art, or to music when things feel overwhelming. What are you currently listening to?

Honestly, I just listen to William Basinski’s music. That’s what I listen to more than anything else. Or I’ll listen to Selena. I just listen to things that make me feel comforted.

I was looking at your recent setlists, and noticed that you have been performing a lot of songs from “Hopelessness” (Anohni’s explosive, electronic album from 2016, which tackled subjects like drone warfare, torture and ecological destruction in the waning years of the Obama administration). This was a bit surprising to me.

I feel very committed to that work I did on the “Hopelessness” project. It was very important for me and I still love those songs very much, and I wanted to see what it was like to play them with a band as opposed to electronics.

It’s been a real joy to play those songs, although some of them are getting harder and harder to play. Performing “Drone Bomb Me” has been pretty excruciating. I wrote that song at a time when American atrocities were being hidden from view, you know, and so it required this kind of leap of imagination to fathom what it was we were up to our necks in. But now everything’s become so visceral. It’s an excruciating song to sing, and I don’t even know if it’s appropriate to sing. But for right now, I am still singing it.

You also play a lot of your early material, dating all the way back to 2000’s “I Am a Bird Now.” 

I move so glacially as an artist, in terms of the themes that I pore through over the course of my life. I’ve been working for over 30 years now, and what amazes me is how little I’ve changed – how basically certain themes have just been honed almost like stones in a river. They’ve just become smoothed out. But they’re still essentially the same, you know? I have a certain point of view and it’s been beautiful to look at the relationships between the songs, and see them in conversation with each other.

Are there any songs that have sort of taken on a new life or that the audience has reacted to in a way that felt unexpected or surprising?  

I would say the more soul songs – “It Must Change,” and “Can’t” – “Can’t” is really flying off the table these days. And “Another World” – We’ve been doing an interpretation of “Another World that’s based on Joan Baez’s interpretation of my (2008) song. Her version of it is so smart, so much better than my version. (Laughs) And that’s really brought it somewhere new because it has this lightness of spirit, this maturity, and this wisdom in it that I didn’t I didn’t carry as much when I first started. 

What are you hoping that the audience will feel during these shows?

I don’t know exactly how people are receiving it, it’s hard for me to really understand what it means to other people. 

I’m no expert in anything. All I’m really good at is having feelings and turning them into noises. At the end of the day that was the skill set that I honed as a result as a survival strategy in response to my life. And there’s something very fortifying about being with these nine musicians, you know, and putting something collectively forward that so much sometimes feels like it’s greater than the sum of its parts.

And that always requires the energy of the audience. You know, I really don’t take the audience for granted or make any presumptions about what’s going on in their minds individually or collectively. It’s. It’s always a meeting. You meet people where they are and try to figure out how to occupy space.

In November, you are playing two tribute shows to your close friend and collaborator Lou Reed, in a show called “Dark Blue” in London and Dublin. How are you feeling about that?

I’m scared to death, obviously (laughs).

It’s a show that I have been thinking about for years. There was a period (before his death in 2013) when was doing really good and he was really happy. This was before he wrote that crazy “Lulu” album, and he was sort of floating in a personal space of peace – he was so sweet to me during that period. But one thing that I always used to say to him is, you should go on tour and do a show with the Johnsons called” Dark Blue.” I offered to curate it, just a show with a quieter band.

(The upcoming shows) are not exactly that – I’ve selected some of his harder material. His material is really complicated and often quite brutal.

I mean, it’s weird that it’s me doing it now, but at the same time I don’t really think there’s anyone better to do it. I think that he’d like that I’m doing it, but I don’t know what he’d think of the end results (laughs).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.