At the time, Anohni admitted she was more star-shocked by meeting Reid’s partner Anderson, the “omnipresent voice” in the growing Anohni household. At 12, she wrote a school report on Anderson’s album, Big Science, and presented it to a heroine at Carnegie Hall decades later. Anderson asked to receive it, and two months later he returned it with a letter A grade.
Anderson now counts Anohni as one of his best friends. “She’s really one of the smartest people I know,” Anderson said. “Her perspective comes from many of her pretty radical ideas about who does what and why. And she’s always right, I must say. Ask her for her take on things.”
childhood In the “post-war petrochemical bubble” in Chichester, England, “Boy George’s voice was a lifeline. So was Alison Moyet’s,” Anohni said of the Yaz singer. “I remember sitting at my grandmother’s house, staring at the radio, crying to the music that was playing, and I didn’t know why I felt that way. It was like I had permission to feel.”
Those English voices taught Anohni to sing. Understanding how they tapped into what she calls the “technology” of black American soul music is part of her current project. “I tried to understand where I came from and what I was made of, and brought that into the album as an unfinished conversation,” she said. That notion inspires the explosive “Can’t,” a heartbreaking tale of refusing to accept the self-inflicted death of her loved one. “There is a kind of magic technology, survival technology in alchemy that mixes suffering and joy,” she said.
Anohni’s mother was a photographer and her father an engineer, a profession that brought her family to Silicon Valley when Anohni was 10 years old. By her early teens, she had rejected “a lot of Judaism and Christianity that was in her family.” Her interaction with her sequoia forest has greatly influenced her connection with nature. She joined a subcultural group interested in awareness raising, “feminist pagan practices” and LSD. Some of these experiences, says Anohni, are “the paradigms I’ve been brought up in are very restrictive filter-like constructs, squeezing reality through this keyhole that provided us with the only way to see reality.” It helped me understand what I was trying to get out.” And it wasn’t. “
The last time Anoni has exposed a dichotomy for himself is day and night. “For me, all day is night,” she said factually. “It was a big deal when I realized that the blue sky was just an illusion and behind it was always the night.”
