Cherimondis J overcomes ‘Anxiety’ in making a return to the stage

The celebration was short-lived when Cherimondis J graduated with a music degree from Ohio State University in 2023, a series of interrelated life changes sending the singer and songwriter into a subsequent tailspin of anxiety and depression.

“There were so many changes happening all at once and I didn’t know how to handle them,” said Cherimondis, who following graduation moved in with her partner – the first time she had lived away from her parents save for a lone semester during her freshman year of college – and began to wrangle with what the next phase of her life might look like as she took those tentative first steps into adulthood. “I was really scared, and there were so many emotions happening that I think I just shut down and hit a massive depression. And I remember I wasn’t talking to my friends, and I wasn’t talking to my family. I would pretty much be in my room crying, because I felt so lost.”

Cherimondis is no stranger to these kinds of weighty emotions, tracing her experiences with anxiety back through early childhood. Indeed, she said her initial decision to step away from music a couple of years back was partly rooted in the sense of overwhelm she experienced while trying to balance her educational pursuits with the added demands on her time that landed in the wake of her 2022 album Dove Archer.

“I had people asking, ‘Can you play this festival? Can you play this? Can you play that?’ … And it became anxiety-inducing, and I had so many breakdowns,” said Cherimondis, who recalled how she struggled in those months to balance a loaded, 18-hour course schedule with tending to a career in independent music. “And there was a sliver of a moment where my studies were declining because I was so tired. And it was clear I couldn’t do both, and that my energy was going too many different places.”

These collective experiences helped to inform Cherimondis’ new single, “Anxiety,” which released last week in anticipation of the musician’s return to the stage at Natalie’s Grandview on Friday, July 11. The song, a slinky soul burner built on nimble funk guitar and Chermondis’ velvet-rich vocals, finds the singer reflecting on the pressures she experienced in that time (“Too many faces, too many eyes”) and the overwhelming need she felt to step away and recharge her batteries. 

The act of putting pen to paper served as a needed pivot point for Cherimondis, who said she turned to songwriting deep in her grief and through the act of creation began to regain her footing. “I’ve always had this problem where I can’t express myself the way that I want, for multiple reasons, and oftentimes when people ask me what’s wrong, I’ll be like, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong.’ I’m angry, I’m frustrated, I’m sad, I’m in utter despair, but I can’t verbalize any of that to them,” said Cherimondis, who anticipates releasing a new full-length sometime in the fall. “But when I sit down at my keyboard, all it takes is a couple of chords to be like, oh, that’s how I’m feeling. It’s like the music can verbalize it for me, and then I can start to figure things out.”

As the music began to surface these knotty emotions, Cherimondis entered into an intense period of self-reflection, which she compared with kickstarting a new relationship. “When you feel lost and don’t know who you are, you literally have to date yourself,” she said. “Take yourself out to the movies. Go to a cafe and don’t even bother asking anyone else to come. Go for a walk. Just take yourself out and experience yourself in your truest form. Figure out what you like, figure out what you don’t like, figure out your sense of style, explore, research. And I’ve had so much time now to do that.”

In this process, Chermondis has learned a number of things about herself, stretching from deep revelations (the musician acknowledged the essential role solitude plays for her in maintaining a baseline level of happiness) to comparatively surface-level discoveries. In recent months, for example, Cherimondis said she has developed an intense passion for cooking, accumulating thousands of recipes via Pinterest and reveling in the simple act of shopping for groceries in anticipation of that week’s planned menu. 

“I love to make something from nothing, where you have these ingredients and you can put them together to make the most gorgeous dish you’ve ever seen, and it’s delicious,” said Cherimondis, who quickly connected these kitchen pursuits with the act of making music. “When I’m creating a song, it’s literally the same thing, where you have all of these sounds, and it’s how you arrange them, how you put them together.”

These personal developments have been accompanied by an evolving perspective on music, with Cherimondis allowing that she has moved from an occasional desire to please others – there are a couple of songs she said she included on Dove Archer only because she thought other people might like them – to something more deeply self-motivated. 

“The want to make music was not always for me, necessarily, and that has changed drastically,” she said. “Coming out of college … I knew I wanted to make myself the highest priority instead of living my life for others. And the music I’m creating now, it’s only for me. And it’s not just for me now, but it’s for little 5-year-old me. It’s for 12-year-old me. It’s for 18-year-old me. Everything that I’m putting out is space for me that I didn’t get. … And if people get something from it, I love that, and I hope it provides a light for someone else where they can find themselves in that same way. But I’m no longer focused on the public ear. It’s more now about who I am, who I want to be, and how I want that to show up in the world.”