Evidence of Joy: In Conversation with Anjimile

Design by Sophie Parrish

By Christian jones

Anjimile (pronounced ann-JIM-uh-lee), is a singer-songwriter based in North Carolina. His latest album, You Are Free to Go, was released on March 13, 2026 via 4AD. It is an achingly tender collection of songs that move fluidly between joy and reckoning. We spoke about the changing seasons, his artistic influences, and giving sound and feeling to the body’s impulses, sensations, and vulnerabilities.

I absolutely adore your new album. It has very much been on as the weather is turning. It feels to me like such a perfect album for the transition between spring into summer, with this feeling of openness and movement and also tenderness. It feels so different from your last album, which is much darker, more of a fall and winter album. So I guess, my first question is a bit more lighthearted—does seasonal change, whether or not that’s tied to the seasons themselves or it’s more of a ‘phases of my life’ type thing, impact the way that the music comes together for you?

Totally, that’s a great question. It’s both, I guess, because on the one hand, it’s like I’m singing about these different phases in my life, aging and whatnot, linearly, but the repetition of the seasons, even if it’s just in my mind that the seasons are affecting the way I read music. You know, like when November hits, it’s time for Sufjan Stevens—Seven Swans. In the summer, we’re still going acoustic, but it’s Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days. I tend to like to emulate the music that I’m listening to. But for this album, You’re Free to Go, the first song was written in May. That’s when I met my partner, and all those love songs were written in the spring. So I’m glad that comes across.

Yeah, it definitely does. I love the way you put that. I also think something that really comes across for me in a major way is the body as one of the main subjects of this album. Like so many great queer artists whom I admire—Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde—the body is always a really important subject, and in a different way than the body is treated throughout, let’s say, the history of straight artistic portrayals. I’m curious about where you see this album’s concerns with the body? How are you expressing and exploring its capacity for impulse and sensation and change? Where does that fit in with how you’ve explored that theme previously?

Okay, first of all, I love this question. Secondly, I think there’s actually something in the air fryer, so I am just going to check so that I can answer this awesome question. [Rustling noises and birds chirping in the background.] Okay, I hope everybody heard all of that. So, the body, well, I think that’s a really astute observation that queer artists tend to relate to the body in a different way than maybe cisgender or straight artists. I think the first thing that comes to mind is just how politicized the queer body is—by the government and by mainstream society. That hyper-aware focus on queer bodies and trans bodies, what those bodies are doing, definitely makes me, as someone who is queer and trans, very aware of my own body too. And more broadly, we’re all already pretty aware of our bodies, we’re seeing bodies everywhere, seeing bodies on Instagram, and there’s a lot of imagery of the human form that could be absorbed. Part of my reason for coming back to it is that I want to reclaim my body and also the politicization of queer and trans bodies, whatever conservatives think that is. I have some evidence, I have some information to share about what my experience is in this body, and how cis and straight bodies have the capacity and potentiality to negatively affect my bodily experience by trying to tell me, for example, which bathroom to use—side note, men’s bathrooms are horrible. On our little tour run, those gas station bathrooms? You all are oppressing yourselves. Anyways I think my reclamation is expressing physical embodiment, expressing that sensuality—but also just the sensation, sensoriness, sensuousness of an experience that it seems like some folks don’t want queer bodies to experience. Pleasure and belonging, that is. And euphoria. I feel grateful that I even have the capacity to express those things in a musical way that feels meaningful to me in my lived experiences as a queer and trans-masc person.

It totally comes across. On the last album, and really in all of your music, there’s a sense of tenderness, which is so beautiful. You mentioned Sufjan Stevens and Iron & Wine, both of which I feel that you have a musical kinship with. But the tenderness on this album feels more focused on the joy and pleasure and liberatory feelings that you talk about, whereas on The King it felt more transgressive, like the fact that you were even expressing and going into those places was a deep catharsis. I’m curious, and I don’t want to phrase it as a ‘the chicken or the egg’ question, but is making art how you process and work through feelings deep within yourself? How would you say that your ability to express those things has changed?

I would say yes about my ability to express that raw emotion, but also incrementally something that has shifted more is my decision to participate in greater levels of vulnerability and depth than I would have in the past. Once it comes time to release music for me, it’s always a choice. It’s like, ‘Okay, which songs do I want to put out?’ Some are really tender, and there’s a lot of very personal music of mine that nobody has ever heard and probably never will. I think over time my willingness to share parts of myself publicly and creatively in these ways has increased. 

Yeah, definitely. I think part of what I’m also trying to ask, too, is whether it is the music itself that is a door for that openness, or if it’s your life experiences that inform and fill in the music?

Yeah, I think let’s call it a revolving door.

I love that. That’s great.

I think these two elements, which aren’t necessarily binary but for the sake of this argument, do revolve around each other and mix in an interesting way. You know, does the song influence you and the experiences you’re having, or is the experience you had influencing the song? Often my writing process goes like I’m living my life, and then I hear music and I know it’s time to sit down and start playing a song, and the song kind of writes itself. I usually write pretty quick, and within the first 30 seconds of plucking around I can tell this is a song I’m gonna write and finish and I can also tell the emotional tenor of the song. When I sit down to write I’m not like ‘Okay time to write about how gay I am’ or ‘time to write about whatever I feel,’ some people are really good at that, having a focused prompt before they begin. For me, the experience is kind of synthesized musically in my life, that song then becomes both like a record of the event and those emotions. It becomes the official record, and, in doing so, it becomes a perpetuation of whatever those thoughts and feelings were, so it is going to inform the future. Sometimes I look back and I felt so strongly about ‘XYZ,’ that I wrote a song about it, and maybe now when this comes up again, I’m feeling more aggressive about it or feeling more emotionally in-tune.

That’s a perfect explanation, and you answered the question I was trying to ask, which was about the musical process and how that works for you. I love when artists talk about how pieces come to them, and I really love this idea that they exist through us—it’s certainly a part of you, and it certainly needs you in order to come into being, but it also exists outside of you somewhere, and you’re kind of channeling it. I read somewhere online that you did some ekphrastic songwriting when you were in L.A. for your last album, where you would write songs according to paintings that you saw at a museum. Does that play very often in your songwriting process, or is that, is that kind of unusual?

I’d say it was unusual to be so direct and intentional about it in the sense that seeing inspiring art will always inspire me to make art, so going to a museum will inevitably inspire me to make art, because I will see something inspiring. But this was a producer, Sean Everett, who said ‘Hey, let’s get ekphrastic with it!’ Just kidding. I’ve never heard that word before actually, but the goal was to enhance the embodied feeling of the music and to create these sonic landscapes that the listener could, I don’t know, hide in, find comfort in, be tortured in. That was my first time doing that in the recording process, and I really enjoyed it. 

Do you feel like that exercise gave you a different outlook on songwriting, or some kind of different way of channeling songs that is stuck with you afterwards?

I would say, yeah. When we got to the museum I had already written these demos, but we didn’t yet have what would become the final product of The King, or even what the sonic palette would be. Allowing paintings to inform the sonic palette of a recording made me realize how I’ve always viewed music as the only artistic medium that you can feel and see and smell into—like if you’re at a festival. But somehow, I think that we were able to make the elements of the two into a three-dimensional sonic experience, and that speaks more to the depth of the art rather than our ability to make something cool.

Did your musical journey begin with songwriting-type things, or was it more of a melodic interest with guitar?

I started out most interested in singing—I was in middle school choir and loved it. Then I got a guitar when I was 11. I think the acquisition of the guitar was maybe the true start of my musical journey, just because at that point I was old enough to have developed specific tastes and desires. I was like, ‘Okay, I want to play blink-182 and Jimi Hendrix.’ The development of that taste might be the important part of an artistic journey.

I would say family is another prominent theme on the album, too. It comes up in all of your albums, but in this one differently than the previous albums. Your parents are Malawian immigrants, and they both work in the STEM fields?

My mom does. My dad is an MD.

How has their relationship to your music and your kind of personal journey changed over the years?

I’d say I’m not really in contact with my mom, but my parents were always supportive. They were like ‘Yes, pursue music as a hobby,’ but when I was like, ‘hey, I wanna pursue this as a career,’ they were like, ‘don’t do that.’ I think that makes sense—they’re Malawian immigrants. So I guess they weren’t super supportive, but in their defense, I went to college in Boston at Northeastern, where I was an english major originally, and then I just changed my major to music industry without telling them. They were like, ‘you can’t do that,’ and I was like, ‘I did.’ So that couldn’t have left a great taste in their mouths, and I kind of stopped sharing music with them for a couple of years. I didn’t tell them I was signed to a label. At least, I didn’t tell my dad that until there was a Rolling Stone article that came out for my first record on Father/Daughter Records. I was like, ‘it’s time to brag to my own family.’ So that’s what I did. He was really excited, and he’s a huge fan now. It’s really cute—he saw me playing in Denton, which was his first time seeing me play as Anjimile. 

That’s awesome. I’m curious about how the different places that you lived have impacted the music. I’m sure you performed at various house shows during this time period, too. I’m seated here right now in Cambridge, so I love it here. And after Boston you moved to North Carolina. What impact did your time in Boston—and of defying your parents’ expectations to follow this musical path—have? Does it have any ripples across where you are now?

Oh yeah, 100%. I started playing music that I wrote when I was 18, a new Northeastern student, and I would play at afterHOURS the venue there that’s also a Starbucks. Then I proceeded to play everywhere—houses, shit that’s closed now, I mean, this was back in the day. I was playing with a bunch of different people—buddies from high school, new friends, random Berklee kids, random musicians in the neighborhood that weren’t just college students. And it was also having the opportunity to go to shows and see what a local band’s career looks like from an outsider’s perspective—what’s their Instagram following like? How many tickets can I guesstimate that they sold for this big gig tonight? How often have I been seeing their name around? What are people saying about them? Boston’s like a big small town, so you can, or at least you could back in the day, work long enough to have somebody start talking about you.

I was a big fan of all of those house show scenes during the first couple of my undergrad here, and it’s such a great way to discover people before they become bigger. But also there’s such a beautiful, raw energy to it—partially because maybe they’re not as big yet—and so many genuine connections that happen in those places between artists, between random people that you meet. Music is ultimately about connection, so that has always been a very fruitful environment to me.

Absolutely.

You’ve touched on a couple of your major influences, but I’m curious about the fact that there are so many different styles that come together so beautifully in your music—in such a way that I hesitate to even call them ‘different.’ There’s the indie-folk, then there’s the rock elements, there’s the soul influences. Do you want to talk about some of some of the people who influence you? You’ve mentioned Sufjan Stevens, and Iron & Wine.

My greatest interest as a songwriter is melody and vocal performance, and so I’ve been trying to figure out for years why my music is often different genres. I think I am not disregarding genre, but I’m just looking for melody, and wherever that comes, wherever the good melody comes, is where I’m gonna go. A huge influence on me is Lauryn Hill. My music sounds nothing like Lauryn Hill, but her melodies and the strength and individuality of her vocal performances—that joy and personality where you can just hear her entire being—I think that’s what makes a really beautiful, memorable album or artist. A very specific, authentic vibe and that is what I guess I think I absorbed from that album. She’s just doing her thing, and I was like, ‘Okay, I think I can do my thing too.’ Tune-yards the band. They had a big splash in, let’s say, 2007 through 2013. The lead singer, her name is Merrill Garbus, has the most powerful, commanding voice I’ve ever heard from a singer. It’s definitely one of my favorite voices ever, and it’s wide and deep and enormous, and I feel—as someone who generally sings pretty like gently, softly, mellowly—that it makes even greater of an impact when that is lost or gone. I learned for my non-soft moments how to make them feel powerful in a way that is still authentic to my style. Also, the music is just fucking weird, the chord progressions are strange. The instruments, it’s like they’re just doing whatever they want, and again, I fuck with that. And then I guess, finally I’m gonna say D’Angelo, rest in peace. I started taking testosterone in 2018, and then I was relearning my voice and how to sing. I had some vocal influences to look to for understanding ‘what is this new voice sound,’ or ‘what’s my falsetto?’I learned how to emulate the Sufjan Stevens’ falsetto, and then I fell in love with D’Angelo’s soulful vibrato and also his twisted, lopsided, diagonal harmonies that are almost evil. He’s definitely my harmony guide.