The loaded promise of a concert titled “It’s Time to Feel What’s Really Happening” constituted more than a snappy tour slogan for Anohni and the Johnsons Saturday at a well-attended Symphony Center. It represented the unvarnished truth. Performing their first local show in more than 15 years, the transgender singer and her group delivered nothing but sheer emotion during one of the most courageous, vital and provocative concerts to grace a Chicago stage in recent memory.
Giving the equivalent of an elegy for the state of the world, Anohni sounded as if she absorbed all the pain, audible and silent, coursing through our collapsing biosphere. Addressing matters that can remain taboo despite their increasing visibility, she confronted ecocide, loss and decimation with a haunting frankness and sorrowful vulnerability that dared everyone in the building to share in a collective ache.
She frequently looked as if the grieving would be too much for even her to bear. Stark, resigned, downcast: Her facial expressions paralleled the hurt in the narratives. Wearing a loose white dress and opera gloves, Anohni often stood frozen in front of the microphone stand, wringing her hands or painstakingly moving her arms in an apparent attempt to keep shell shock at bay. Dark, low-lit lighting and cast shadows reinforced the severity of the moment.
Anohni’s gorgeous, ethereal singing provided alluring contrasts. Occupying an ever-shifting middle ground between registers, she blended smooth tones, vibrato phrasing and a sweeping falsetto in elegant deliveries that were at once fragile and fierce, sensual and intense. She stood at the intersection of a soulful crooner, gospel balladeer and art-pop chanteuse, with the role of protest singer serving as a common link.
Displaying profound levels of empathy and selflessness for the natural environment, Anohni seemingly internalized every line she sang. Played at slow and midtempo paces by an assembly of strings, horns, guitars, piano and percussion, the music permitted her to dwell on what it all signified in the here and now. That meant posing extremely difficult questions, admitting her own culpability, imagining herself in other beings’ positions, illuminating depressing details and challenging established conventions.
Being an outsider is nothing new to the singer. Born in 1971 in England (as Antony Hegarty) and raised in California, she cut her teeth in New York’s underground in the early ‘90s and founded a performance collective that helped land her a grant. That led to the genesis of a band, which she coined in honor of gay liberation leader Marsha P. Johnson. Following a handful of low-key releases, a string of studio and live collaborations with her mentor — and fellow rule-breaking experimentalist — Lou Reed functioned as Anohni’s public breakthrough.
Immediately distinguished by an album cover that depicts photographer Peter Hujar’s iconic “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed” portrait, her 2005 “I Am a Bird Now” LP won the prestigious Mercury Prize. The record established the singer as an inimitable voice, visual maverick and uncompromising activist who excels on multiple fronts — and whose work helped lay foundations for modern LGBTQIA+ and feminist causes that currently find themselves in political crosshairs.
Her multifaceted output continues to attract substantial acclaim and achieve considerable success, particularly overseas. In the past two decades, she’s paired with filmmakers, orchestras, festivals, and fashion events; headlined benefits; crafted essays, books and videos; staged exhibitions and plays; and earned a second Mercury Prize nomination, an Academy Award nod and best-of-year acknowledgments from heavyweights such as the New York Times, The New Yorker and Pitchfork. An impressive pedigree for any creative, especially one whose messages, however credible, are usually not what people want to hear.
And yet, the timing of Anohni’s declarations couldn’t be more necessary.
Though she made no direct references to a pair of massive hurricanes that decimated regions in the Southeast, climate change was top of mind. Anohni used an extended version of the delicate “You Are My Sister” as an opportunity to weave in first-hand experiences and observations amid new and old verses. She spoke of the mass die-offs of cedar trees she witnessed last week in the Pacific Northwest; of hearing women tell her of their fears of femicide in Greece; of watching scientists weep as they discussed the soon-coming total breakdown of coral reefs; of the veteran meteorologist who, days ago, went viral after shedding tears on television reporting on Hurricane Milton.
“What does it mean to cry about a statistic,” she wondered, hinting at the mourning and reflection at the core of nearly all her songs. She asked far tougher questions. Several of the harshest framed an entire song, “Why Am I Alive Now?,” while another that fearlessly equated humans with disease — “how did I become a virus?” — anchored “Hopelessness.” She also called out glaring contradictions of elite systems, ranging from organized religions to capitalist economies, all the while her exceptional nine-piece band reacted on the fly with chamber-pop backdrops.
Along with riffing on the notion that “empirical truth has no opposite,” Anohni unmasked certain social constructs and demasculated control in her implied pleas for understanding, compassion and awareness. Her love for plants, wildlife, insects, rivers and seasons manifested in explicit sonic and lyrical manners.
Cooing, humming, fluttering, scatting, quivering, moaning, sighing: Anohni drew on a diverse range of vocal techniques. On occasion, her singing evoked a composed sobbing. It turned aggressive only once, though ruin, destruction and injustice lurked right beneath the primarily sweet and tender surfaces.
The tranquil, twirling “Manta Ray” could’ve passed for a children’s lullaby save for the fact the tune lamented the disappearance of biodiversity in no uncertain terms. Staked to a hip hop beat and churning rhythm, “4 Degrees” found the singer pointing the finger at herself for her complicity in contributing to the planet’s overheated condition. Despite its outward beauty, the acoustic folk of “Cut the World” harbored savage tension that ultimately burst via crashing cymbals and mallet-pounded drums. For “It Must Change” and “Can’t,” Anohni and company glided to rubbery R&B grooves whose upbeat attributes belied the solemnity of the words.
For all the sobering honesty and bold creativity on offer, the performance briefly lost focus during a protracted piano introduction and a subsequent, overly lengthy reading of “Everglade.” There, the singer and her mates aimlessly drifted, succumbing to avant garde excesses that the remainder of the pursuits — including two interpretive dance sequences by longtime Anohni colleague Johanna Constantine — avoided.
Indeed, nobody could’ve missed or misconstrued the ensemble’s aims in the horrifying “Drone Bomb Me.” A veiled Anohni sang from the perspective of a traumatized individual in a war-torn country who begs to die rather than survive amid the constant assaults of an unseeable tech-savvy military power. Completed with heavy gong thwacks that mimicked targeted explosions, the presentation took on heightened relevance due to the ongoing carnage and violence, especially pertaining to women and children, in the Middle East and Ukraine.
During the encore, Anohni left some room for understated humor — a well-deserved exhale. She expressed gratitude and, sardonically, wished everybody luck with the presidential elections. As she sat at the piano and began to play the hymn-like “Hope There’s Somebody,” she paused to muse about stasis. She resumed until, seconds later, she interrupted the song again and chased another tangent with verbose enthusiasm.
That pattern persisted, eliciting laughter and, revealingly, allowing for fascinating insight into a beautiful, concerned soul for whom being comfortably numb is not an option. And neither, for her or us, despite the singer’s deepest wishes, is another world.
Bob Gendron is a freelance critic.
Setlist from Symphony Center Oct. 12:
“Why Am I Alive Now?”
“4 Degrees”
“Manta Ray”
“Cut the World”
“Hopelessness”
“It Must Change”
“You Are My Sister”
“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” (traditional cover)
“Can’t”
“Everglade”
“Another World”
“Drone Bomb Me”
Encore
“Hope There’s Someone”
