I Am A Bird Now Turns 20

Anohni's Mercury Prize victory in 2005 for I Am A Bird Now was one of the most lucrative wins in the history of Britain's homegrown music award, increasing sales of her second album with the Johnsons over 900 percent. It was also one of the most controversial, and not for the reasons you might expect. Anohni was born in England, but the singer is every bit a creature of New York's queer theater underground, and despite the mid-Atlantic lilt that flutters about the edges of her voice, the songs on I Am A Bird Now aren't far removed from what she'd been doing less than a decade ago with the Blacklips Performance Cult theater troupe. Was it British enough to win? The Kaiser Chiefs, upstart guitar band and favorites for the prize, didn't think so. "[She's] an American, really," said Kaiser Chief Nick Hodgson about the singer, whose band was then known as Antony And The Johnsons. "It's a good album, but it's daft [she] got in on a technicality."

You'd expect a tedious replay of rock's military campaigns against quieter and queerer genres, but I was relieved to browse even a contemporary soccer forum and see that those who didn't agree it was British agreed with Hodgson that I Am A Bird Now was something special. Most of the hyperbole ultimately came down to Anohni's voice, the kind of timbre that makes you stop and wonder who the hell is singing and where they came from. That voice would show up on a lot of records in the late 2000s. There she was crooning about semen on Matmos' queer-history-through-funk opus The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast. There she was on a new version of Oneohtrix Point Never's "Returnal," singing what was previously chipmunked. There she was waxing existential on Hercules And Love Affair's "Blind," a great song that's sort of like "All My Friends" stripped to its skivvies and greased (it was Pitchfork's 2008 Track Of The Year).

You'd never heard anything quite like that voice: bosomy when low, unearthly when high, pitched at a quiver, curling into the most curious diphthongs. You especially didn't expect it coming out of a ghost-white Irish-Anglo-American trans woman, whose substantial height was often remarked on in early reviews as a novelty (most early press describes Anohni as a gay man and refers to her with male pronouns). Nina Simone was the most common reference point, and indeed Anohni's voice is frequently taken for that of a Black woman, a perception Anohni has never encouraged but has also never really downplayed. Anohni hasn't been shy about the Simone influence but has been equally keen to situate herself in a tradition of British blue-eyed soul oddballs like Marc Almond (she always liked his dark side project Marc And The Mambas) and Boy George (who plays a "sister" consoling Anohni on one of I Am A Bird Now’s best songs).

Listening to I Am A Bird Now 20 years after its release, it's clearer than ever that it was that voice that won it the Mercury Prize and that this is more a transitional record than a sui generis masterpiece. Everything that could potentially make Anohni an important artist to someone is already there: that wounding voice, the explicit expression of transgender desires, the gift for multi-tracked self-harmonies to rival Elliott Smith's. Yet I would argue the full scope of Anohni's gift developed on 2009's The Crying Light, where she hired Nico Muhly to spruce up the arrangements to Night Of The Hunter levels of sickly-baroque-dreaminess and focused primarily on the plight of the Earth. This has been Anohni's primary theme ever since, and as her subject matter has grown more specific, her songwriting and ear for arrangement have sharpened. Here, there's a fuzziness, a tentativeness, a lack of confidence indicating a still-growing creative voice.

Rather than using her voice as a sharpened tool for inflicting the most emotional damage as possible through her words, as Nina Simone was always willing to do, Anohni occasionally uses her vocal frills to compensate for the times when the words aren't 100 percent there. The best the internet can offer me for the incantation at the end of "Spiraling" is "held brave Roäc" – –the raven from The Hobbit? It's never entirely clear whether "My Lady Story" is about cancer or gender confirmation surgery. The phrasing bends English for the sake of a rhyme ("I'm going to be born into soon the sky"), and the Johnsons' minimal arrangements leave these kinks with nowhere to hide.

What's more important on I Am A Bird Now is the general feeling of, as "Hope There's Someone" puts it, being stuck "in the middle place between light and nowhere." This is the kind of language often used to describe gender dysphoria, a feeling "For Today I Am A Boy" puts in the bluntest possible terms, but it can describe any limbo state: being no longer a child and not yet an adult, or even the state between life and death (the cover art, by Peter Hujar, shows Warhol superstar Candy Darling on her deathbed at age 29). Interviewing Anohni for Pitchfork circa I Am A Bird Now, Matmos's Drew Daniel suggested that final track "Bird Gerhl" is where the album's protagonist finally finds release. Anohni responded that it wasn't so simple. Transition defines these songs, for better or worse.

Anohni's voice is the heart and soul of I Am A Bird Now, but it's far from the only one we hear. She surrounds herself with an idiosyncratic roster of guests, each one of which has something to say about her place in the musical ecosystem in 2005. Original Johnson Julia Yasuda recites the text of a hymn over a Morse Code transliteration of the same. Devendra Banhart does a pretty good Tiny Tim impression on "Spiraling," reminding us that Anohni was tangentially connected with the freak-folk movement (she appeared on Banhart's definitive Golden Apples Of The Sun comp and was pals with CocoRosie). Rufus Wainwright drops by, as if to offer an endorsement from queer pop's chart vanguard. Boy George, hale and bluesy, is a queen passing the torch to another.

And then there's NYC legend Lou Reed, who gave Anohni her break by featuring her in his Berlin revival in 2003 and shows up on "Fistful Of Love" to deliver a monologue and a cantankerous squall of feedback. "Fistful Of Love," written in the ‘90s with Blacklips, is the album's most difficult song to swallow: a hymn to an abusive lover, where each bruise and cut is a "memory of your devotion," where the fist and whip are "out of love." It's also a song that illustrates the paradox of the first half of Anohni's career, which is that she sounded absolutely fucking great over vintage Daptone-style soul but never committed to it over the course of a full album. Songs would emerge, like "Thank You For Your Love" and "Aeon," that suggested what she could do if she leaned into that sound. Yet Anohni still preferred to be surrounded by quasi-classical instrumentation or, on Hopelessness, EDM production from Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke.

It took until 2023, when a lot of people had been crying to her songs for decades, to wrap all the threads of her career into the masterpiece she clearly had in her. My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is one of the most wounding albums ever made — and not just because of its uncompromising subject matter, from a dying man's final sense memories to a desperate mother's inability to feed her children, but because Anohni had apparently made a pact with herself to hold nothing back emotionally. There was the sense on the early Anohni albums that she hadn't quite committed to fucking her audience up in the way she clearly could. Not only is that impulse completely absent from My Back, opener "It Must Change" is actually about why she decided to make the album so sad. Best of all, the whole thing is swathed in the trappings of warm ‘70s soul.

It's reasonable to imagine that those voting for I Am A Bird Now at the Mercurys had no idea that Anohni would top it almost 20 years later. It's a vote, I imagine, for an artist clearly gifted with a special gift and something to say. The voice was already there, but to look at Anohni's career since I Am A Bird Now is to see how her artistry grew into it.