Wé Ani turns 25 today. Last spring when she auditioned for American Idol her protean voice began drilling a hole in my soul.
Due more to what was going on in my life than her talent, her equally powerful performances on The Voice in 2016 didn’t have that lasting effect.
Her career is a story of strong family support, raw talent (dancing, acting, classical voice training), and diligence (wé ani in Swahili).
I’ll let my notes from 2023’s last post introduce the rest of this one:
. . . Harlem-born performer Wé Ani (b. 1999) [is] the most versatile, and powerful, pop singer I’ve ever heard, whose voice salves my charred soul and never fails to plaster a smile on my face. My wife and I had first seen her in 2016 on The Voice (when she went by “Wé McDonald”).
A physically different (almost unrecognizably so) Wé competed in last season’s (2023) American Idol . . . She can belt like nobody’s business, folk her way through any ballad (guitar and all), or rock it out, or out-Broadway any veteran of The Great White Wé, I mean, Way.
There seem to be at least a half dozen Wé Anis: after watching any two videos, I sincerely wonder, “Is that the same singer?” . . .
And then there’s the uncanny sonic chasm between her childlike speaking pitch and her robust, gritty singing voice: she says she wants to be taken seriously, but “it’s not easy sounding like a 12-year-old at 23.” The simile that comes to my mind is fiction’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (minus the creepy associations): she makes a fool of anyone who prejudges her talent on that basis. . . .
She’s also a modest and charming interviewee (sans tatoos, nose ring, acrylic claws and other accoutrements of female celebrityhood): consider one from 2018 and another from September.
Wé’s voice and musical choices take me back to the day, about sixty years, when pop music entered my life, washing away life’s dirt as images of war, assassinations, and race riots washed across the TV screen.
Her voice is more than pleasant: it’s a delivery system for aesthetic endorphins, an oasis and tonic for my soul.
But the above text is so much blather. Why not taste and see for yourself?
Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Wé Ani, My Musical Tonic and Oasis”