British-born, New York-based ANOHNI, described by NPR’s All Songs Considered as “one of our generation’s greatest protest singers, or protest songwriters”, presents My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, the new album from ANOHNI and the Johnsons.
ANOHNI describes the creative process for My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, her first album since 2016’s acclaimed HOPELESSNESS, as painstaking, yet also inspired, joyful, and intimate, a renewal and a renaming of her response to the world as she sees it. “Some of these songs respond to global and environmental concerns first voiced in popular music over 50 years ago,” says ANOHNI of her sixth studio album.
With this album, ANOHNI’s approach moved from someone tasked with challenging global denial to an artist seeking to support others on the front lines. “I learned with HOPELESSNESS that I can provide a soundtrack that might fortify people in their work, in their activism, in their dreaming and decision-making. I can sing of an awareness that makes others feel less alone, people for whom the frank articulation of these frightening times is not a source of discomfort but a cause for identification and relief. I want the work to be useful, to help others move with dignity and resilience through these conversations we are now facing.”
My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross expresses a world view by shape-shifting through a broad range of subject matter. Through a personal lens, ANOHNI addresses loss of loved ones, inequality, alienation, acceptance, cruelty, ecocide, devastation wrought by Abrahamic theologies, Future Feminism, and the possibility that we might yet transform our ways of thinking, our spiritual ideas, our societal structures, and our relationships with the rest of nature.
Release: July 7th, 2023, Rough Trade/Remote Control