5. Anohni and the JohnsonsI Am A Bird Now
I was still trying to find my voice as a singer when I first found this, and that was actually the gateway for me. I loved the record, it had a mood, it had an aesthetic, it had a cord from A to B. It had people like Lou Reed and Boy George on it; these characters that I had heard of but never really experienced.
There was nothing that spoke queerness in my world at that time. If you saw something, it was such a caricature of what [queerness] actually is like, and it was great to see that subtlety. I wasn’t out at all, I was very ashamed of the kind of person I knew I was. I’m still very much to myself when it comes to things like sexuality. It’s not something I try to scream about. I must have been around 15, 16 years old, understanding I had different preferences. I definitely didn’t grow up with any examples of that. The people that I did meet who were gay, I didn’t feel exactly in that way either. So it was this grey area of: what do I actually call myself? What do I see myself as?
Now I’m way more comfortable with myself in that regard, but hearing people like ANOHNI really gave that the go ahead. Also knowing and following her story, it made me want to get more in touch with – well, it sounds cheesy, but my feminine side. Tracks like ‘For Today, I Am A Boy’ and ‘Man Is The Baby’ made me really think about how I’d been forced to be a man in a certain way and that actually, I don’t have to be. I’m just not that way. Reading their interviews, being in that space, even finding out who the artwork’s about, Candy Darling, seeing that world for the first time as a 15 year old was so powerful. So I’m very happy I found this.
