Anjimile and Drew pose with “Therapy” music video star Banana Dan – Photo by Matia Guardabascio
Anjimile (sound it out as “An-jim-ill-ee”) hit the Boston scene a few years back with the release of the 2012 EP In the Garden. The band Anjimile is led by Anjimile, or “Anji”, Chithambo, a gender neutral student from Northeastern University, with a sound defined by smooth vocals that rise and fall like a gentle carnival ride carrying both delicacy and power. Combined this with vibrant harmonies, catchy chord progressions, and sincere artistic integrity, Anjimile are making their mark and staking a claim to be one of Boston’s most consequential acts.
Being a black genderqueer already may seem like a lot to handle, but a struggle Anjimile finds particularly challenging is societal recognition in their pursuit to make a life out of music. It is this conflict that helps spark the recording of their first full length album Human Nature, which was released on March 24th. An enticing and diverse concept album that thematically explores life and death, Human Nature proves Anjimile’s keen awareness of the world around them. The album is intelligent and introspective in its journey, questioning the meaning of serious musicianship while functioning as a successful metaphor for the human experience. Check out tracks “Ha ha ha,” “Wanted by the Law,” “Human Nature” and “Brain Disease” to get an idea. Allston Pudding had the chance to sit down with Anjimile and their friend, engineer, and drummer Drew Wilcox to discuss the process that went into dropping this album.
Allston Pudding: Anji, what moved you to become a musician?
Anjimile Chithambo: I love creating music and what I’m trying to do in Boston is sustain my life through music by sharing it with others. I started writing songs the summer before my freshmen year of college. I used to write poems when I was younger. I found I would end up putting rhythm to meter. I could hear a beat to where there wasn’t any. When I started writing poems in the sixth grade, I was a huge fan of Dr. Suess, so all my poems rhymed. As I got older, I began reading Shakespeare in high school and I got really in to that, so a lot of my poems became less free form in writing and more about iambic pentameter and sonnets. I write a lot of sonnets [laughs] I like sonnets a lot. And recently I’ve been dabbling in more spoken word. My music, I guess, mimics my poems through the rhyming.
AP: During this time, what was your experience with music?
AC: I started performing in the middle school choir and all that. But I guess the bulk of my music learning came from listening to music. I didn’t take music classes because my school didn’t have them. I started listening to a shit ton music in the sixth grade. I had a Good Charlotte poster in my room [laughs] it was huge. I still like Good Charlotte, I think their first album is still pretty good.
AP: So then you came to Northeastern, you started performing and releasing EPs. You also met your bandmate and engineer Drew Wilcox. How did you guys get together?
Drew Wilcox: I met Anji my sophmore year at Northeastern at a party where they were playing. I was just taken aback. Their songs were really good. Anji has an incredible voice and was very well performed. I was impressed, and at the time I had been trying to get more involved with performing music and collaborating with people. I’ve been a musician for about ten years, I started on the piano and now I play a few other things. I wanted to get more serious about music so after I saw Anji I went up to them and asked if they wanted to hang out sometime. We hit it off really well and that night we started sharing music and a week later we jammed with a friend, Lee Schuna, who’s actually the producer of Human Nature. It was a big moment meeting Anji and definitely changed my trajectory as a musician.
AC: Yeah, it was definitely a fateful meeting. I would go to parties and there would be a guitar, so when everyone was drunk at the end I would play everyone to sleep [laughs], that’s what I had been doing for the past two years. And so Drew was there, and as a little kid I always thought about being in a rock band. When I met Drew, he was like “I play stuff.” When I asked “what do you play?” he said “a lot of stuff, whatever you need I can play,” so I said “OK!” Jamming with him and Lee a week later definitely changed my trajectory. I think it was shortly after meeting Drew that I dropped my English major and became a Music major [laughs]. For me it was a huge shift. I used to think I would be a teacher and do music on the side, but then I decided I didn’t want to be a teacher and wanted to make a life out of music. It was a huge mental leap.
AP: As a former solo performer, how has a full band affected performing your older songs?
AC: It depends on the era of the song and the bandmate. When I was doing singer/songwriter stuff there was no percussion at all, so Drew had all the leeway to create the percussive part. Likewise for a lot of older tracks, there may not be lead guitar but there’s obviously a melodic structure that has to be generally followed. Our lead guitarist, Ryan, has a lot more room to do shit than, say, our bassist, because I do write a lot bass tracks and Rohan plays along to that, but Ryan has the opportunity to add on more.
AP: You identify as non-binary genderqueer, preferring to go by “they” over “he” or “she.” What was the process to that realization?
AC: I moved to Jamaica Plain this past September, I moved in with two other people who are very queer. Our house is just like a gaytopia, it’s gay as fuck, everybody who lives there is queer as fuck. One of my roommates told me they identify as “they” and I thought “what is that?” I found it interesting. Like, you can do that? By being exposed to a larger queer community has expanded my vocabulary when it comes to my identify. Identifying as gender queer is something I have always felt but never had the words for. Say you’re going to the grocery store every week, you get your meats and cheese and your Oreos. Then you go to the fruit section and there’s this fruit there. It’s your favorite ever and you’re like “fuck! I love this fruit!” so you buy a whole bag every time you go to the grocery store. You come home and your roommates say “you know those are called apples right?” and you say “What? These are called apples? That’s great! Now I know what to ask for every time I go to the grocery store and I can research more about apples since I love them so much.” Me identifying as genderqueer is me finding the language to express and identify myself. It’s been really interesting since gender binary is such a culturally pervasive concept. I think that gender is a social construct that is very real and part of our cultural ideology. It’s interesting observing that through the lens of a non gender-binary person, while also still being apart of it and engaging with it by default. I’ve noticed since being non gender-binary how gendered things are, things that don’t need to be. Like you see “scissors… for boys” and “scissors… for girls” when really its like, “Yo, those are just scissors.”
AP: So in terms of your identity, what’s your relationship with music?
AC: I definitely use music to express myself, it’s my form of artistic self expression. It’s kind of trippy, you know? My name is Anjimile, my band is Anjimile, so it’s gets into this weird psychological thing of “Where does one Anjimile begin and Anjimile end?” [laughs] It’s very meta. My identify is definitely inextricably linked to my music, but then again, it always has been.
AP: This knowledge of yourself and your identity can be empowering. Is that reflected on your album at all?
AC: Yes and no. I think the existence of the album itself is a form of empowerment because a queer black person made it. But it’s not an uplifting album. It’s kind of depressing and largely about death and mortality. I think my identities informed my music because my non-binariness and my blackness and general queerness put me outside the “norm,” which is good for the music because its really fucking weird, but there’s also a sense of isolation that comes across in the tracks. It’s a very introspective, in my own head type of thing.
AP: Are there specific influences in the writing and recording of this album?
AC: It was heavily influenced by my songwriting class I took at Northeastern. Shout out to Bradley Hatfield who taught the class. I wrote the song “Human Nature” in the class and the song is about the idea of being a musician and being scoffed at by the general public. Like “that’s not a real thing, to be a musician” and once again being a musician is outside the norm, culturally. I feel like in the same way that I feel different because I’m queer and black and non-binary, I also feel different because I am a musician. There’s that cultural assault of being a musician.
DW: From a production standpoint most of the album was recorded in the studio with Anji and myself. Basically, it happened because we could do it, we don’t need a lot of experience or great equipment to make an album that we care about. I think Anji has great songs and I wanted to help them get their music out and shared with the world. So we got in the studio and made it happen and our good friend Lee did some recording and mixing. I’m a big fan of The Velvet Underground and I think that influenced a lot of what I did on the album—both from a musician standpoint and a production standpoint. Particularly the drumming, Maureen Tucker does what she needs to do to move the song along, but it’s not complicated, it gets the job done. People might call it bad drumming, similar to Meg White, but I like it. I don’t think there’s one way to make an album or one way to do many things. The struggle of a musician to be taken seriously can be a metaphor for other identities. For me, we were going to do this album because we could.
AP: So that track “Human Nature” got the wheels turning, what’s been the journey since?
AC: I wrote all the tracks at different times through the course of a year, and Drew suggested we make an album. It was way after the songs were written that I came up with the concept for the album. I really like concept albums. I’m a huge fan Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and shit like that. So I created a little story, the life and death of an artist, the jubilation and fear and confusion and madness and greatness that comes out of being an artist and making art.
AP: I have heard the tracks and though you say it’s not an uplifting album, I don’t think it’s entirely unhappy. Some of the music is very upbeat. I think there’s a juxtaposition that needs to be recognized. What is the flow of this album in terms of the life and death struggle of the artist?
AC: I agree, it’s not necessarily a happy album but it’s not an unhappy album either. It’s just introspective. Maybe not necessarily serious but definitely not singing about stupid shit that doesn’t matter. I was thinking of the album in terms of human life. I wanted to start the album with a burst of energy, like you’re alive now. Then sonically it builds up until the middle of the album, which I consider through the age of adolescent rebellion, your twenties and thirties when you’re trying to figure shit out, it’s just like chaos. So it goes from a tranquil acoustic track to complete and total chaos in the middle of the album. And then from there it mellows out. I thought of the the album in three parts, and the third part I was thinking of when you’re old. I feel like old people are pretty chill. They’re not as emotionally or mentally hectic. The last track “I Go” is an acapella piece. I used to be in choir so it’s choral and it’s suppose to be the death of the artist.
AP: What are other metaphors that could describe the album? Colors? Food? Times of the Year?
AC:It’s definitely a colorful album, to say the least. I guess it’s kind of corny to say, but there are so many mood shifts on the album around and within the three parts, the only way I could describe is as a rainbow.
DW: It’s totally rainbow, what’s else would it be? [laughs]
AC: [laughs] Yeah, it’s a rainbow of emotion, you know? Cascading over your ears and shoulders, wrapping you up.
DW: It’s definitely a rainbow and it sure as hell ain’t Christopher Columbus Day. [laughs] It’s a diverse album for sure. I have this disheveled image in my head. You know how it’s been so snowy in Boston? It’s like if you had 10 different people, each track is a person, and these people went to go shovel the same parking lot, but they each had different types of shovels. Some of them started to work as a team but others didn’t, kind of like the social dynamic that naturally occurs with people. People group up together and form cliques, and there’ll be outsiders and the counter culture groups and what not. But in the end it gets shoveled. From the general standpoint, the parking has been cleared, but if you look closely, if you listen closely, you can see differences that went in to making it happen.
AP: How are the live performances going? How do you treat these songs in a live setting?
AC: There are a couple of tracks we haven’t played yet, but for the most part I really like playing these songs live. They have the added addition of Ryan’s lead guitar. I really love the color, atmosphere and the interesting shit Ryan lays down that transforms the song into something super sick. It’s interesting to see what a musician brings to the group. Rohan didn’t play bass on the record, but he puts his own bass flavor, he cleans some stuff up for us. I feel like the live performances of our tracks are different. There’s some live magic sprinkled in there.
DW: Some of the tracks are acoustic, stripped down. Then there’s the last track that’s a choral piece. Also there’s an electro funk tune called “Wanted by the Law” that has a lot of production elements. Those are some examples of tracks that would definitely take some different instrumentation and production to perform in a live setting. A few of our acoustic tracks could be played, but our live shows are much more electric, much more rocky right now. Whereas on the album we could kind of put whatever we want on it, from an audience standpoint, some consistency in our live act does a lot to familiarize people our sound. Although we do have a diverse live sound, we want to tailor to our audience and that often means playing in a similar sound. It depends on what musicians we have or if we do an acoustic set, then some of these new songs could pop up in a situation like that. Some of those tunes on the album on may or may not be played live but that has yet to be determined.
AP: Will that theme of the cycle of life and death be reflected in your live shows?
AC: Probably not, except maybe at our release show. But for I feel like for a general gig, though I like the concept, it might be a bit too heavy for a gig at AfterHours. [laughs] To be like “OK now this is the chronicle of the life and death of an artist,” nah, people just want to drink Starbucks and bob their heads. I guess it depends on the setting. If it was at an art gallery or something, maybe.
AP: When is your album release show?
AC: April 4th in the bowels of Boston. It’s going to be sick as fuck!
For more information and updates on Anjimile check out their website and Facebook