Wiki
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Release Date
7 July 2023
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Length
10 tracks
This album is My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross by ANOHNI and the Johnsons.
"My Back Was a Bridge For You To Cross" is the fifth studio album by Anohni and the Johnsons, and Anohni's sixth overall. It's currently set to be released on 7/7/2023. The lead single, "It Must Change", was released on 5/16/2023.
The album cover is an image of trans trailblazer Marsha P Johnson, about which Anohni wrote:
"I chose this soulful portrait of Marsha P. Johnson, taken by photographer Alvin Baltrop, as the cover for my record MY BACK WAS A BRIDGE FOR YOU TO CROSS. When I first arrived in NYC in 1990, elders in the Village told me about Marsha. I lived by the West Side highway, and I sometimes saw Marsha on Christopher Street. I admired her, and fate decreed that on the sunny day before her passing, at the gay pride parade, I thanked her, and told her I loved her, and kissed her hand. She smiled sweetly and just said "Oh I love you too, doll".
A week later, her precious body was drawn from the Hudson. I organized some friends to walk from Sheridan Square to that spot by the water's edge where her body had lain. I was wearing a wedding dress. A few souls spoke at this memorial. Then I spray painted her name across the piers and covered the village with posters of Marsha wearing a tiara, and the word "S.T.A.R." The whole thing set a fire inside me that I didn't understand.
I tried as an artist to help carry her name across a divide of night and into the broader light of culture. In 1995, we re-enacted her journey in The Ascension of Marsha P. Johnson. I sang River of Sorrow over and again. In 2006, she smiled upon us from the screen during TURNING. In 2012, when I performed at Radio City Music Hall, I saw her name on the marquis. It felt like a triumph, but it was still a secret, her work still invisible.
In the last 6 years Marsha has finally been recognized by multiple sources as the Rosa Parks of the trans and gay Civil rights movements, along with her sister, Sylvia Rivera.
For me, it is an honor to represent Marsha here, who Agosto Machado once described as a bodhisattva. This record cover, the most important of my career, commemorates the restoration of connections and neural pathways between generations, past and future."
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