Anna Gutmanis

Anna Gutmanis is a Toronto singer-songwriter and keyboardist whose work has moved through pop, rock, blues, R&B, reggae, gospel and dance music over a career that began in the early 1980s. Her recorded catalogue spans more than four decades and has developed alongside a long involvement in feminist, LGBTQ+, anti-racism and community work. Gutmanis has released her music independently through her Ban-Anna Records label, performed throughout Canada and the United States, and in later years extended her work into film, photography and visual art. She names Laura Nyro, Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder as her principal songwriting influences, with Barbra Streisand, Joan Armatrading, Nina Simone, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Marvin Gaye also part of her musical background.

Concert material held in the Alternative Toronto archive places Gutmanis in the city’s independent music community by 1982 or 1983, when her name appeared in the program for the two-day Inner City Music Festival. In July 1983 she took part in the first annual benefit concert series for the Emily Stowe Shelter for Women at the Rivoli on Queen Street West. The shelter housed and supported women and children at risk of gender-based violence, and the annual concerts drew musicians from Toronto’s alternative community. Gutmanis played four of the Emily Stowe benefits during the 1980s.

Her place in Toronto’s women’s and alternative music networks is well documented for 1984. On February 17 she played the Fallout Shelter on Queen Street East, on a poster that ties the show to Women In Alternative Music and the Act Against Cruise Testing Coalition. On March 13 she appeared at the Horseshoe Tavern in the Alter Eros Festival’s International Women’s Day cabaret, on a bill with Lorraine Segato, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Jane Farrow, Cynthia Grant and other women working in music, theatre and the arts. Later that year she played Earth Tones at Queen and Spadina and returned to the Rivoli for the second Emily Stowe Shelter benefit, whose lineup included L’Étranger, Fifth Column, Chalk Circle, Rheostatics, the Clichettes and other Toronto groups.

Politics ran through her songwriting from the start. In 1984 she recorded a two-song demo with the Toronto band L’Étranger. The recordings picked up airplay on Ontario college radio, and ‘Empire’, a song about racism and sexism, charted at several stations. Gutmanis kept the tape and came back to it more than thirty years later.

She kept working Toronto clubs through the middle of the decade. Posters record a two-night engagement at the Free Times Café on January 8 and 9, 1985, another Emily Stowe Shelter benefit at the Holiday Café that December, a further shelter benefit at the Rivoli in January 1987 and another Free Times Café date on November 11, 1987. The 1987 benefit put her on a four-night bill with Lillian Allen, Faith Nolan, Andrew Cash, Rheostatics and Tulpa.

By the second half of the decade she was assembling the songs for her first commercial release. ‘Then Came You’ and ‘Til Doomsday’ date from 1986, ‘Baby Doll’ and ‘Still in Love’ from 1987, and ‘If You Want a Lover’ and ‘Out of Time’ from 1988. She recorded the six-song self-titled Anna Gutmanis with producer and arranger Robert Webber at Reaction Studios in Toronto, with Robi Banerji and Ormond Jobin engineering. The players included Webber on guitars, Don Zablotny on electric guitar, Rob Laidlaw and Mark Heine on bass, Bob Mahaney on slide guitar and Randy Cook on drums, with backing vocals from Ken Tobias, Craig Manning and Sean McDermott. Gutmanis issued the record herself through Ban-Anna Records in 1989.

A release performance followed at the Free Times Café on October 12, 1989. Reviewing the record for The Independent Corner, Bruce Landon described her as a singer and pianist working mainly in pop and rock while drawing on R&B and other styles. He singled out the upbeat ‘If You Want a Lover’ and the reggae-tinged ‘Then Came You’, calling the latter possibly the record’s catchiest song. ‘Til Doomsday’, about drug and alcohol abuse, took her outside the love songs that made up most of the release. The Record called it a promising debut.

‘Then Came You’ had a long life for an independently issued Canadian record. Gutmanis has said the song was still getting radio play more than twenty years after its release, and in June 2014 Steve Fruitman played the original Ban-Anna vinyl on his CIUT program 33.45.78.

Gutmanis then stepped away from the music business for an extended period. She has described those years as a time when she raised children, returned to school and worked in social services. She completed a degree in Equity Studies at the University of Toronto, where she received the Bonham Scholarship for Studies in Sexual Diversity. At George Brown College she completed the Assaulted Women’s and Children’s Counsellor/Advocate program and co-founded the college’s first Women’s Centre. She was also a co-founder of The Web, an early newsletter devoted to women’s services.

When she decided to return to recording, she also decided to be publicly open about her sexuality, something she has said she did not feel able to do when she made her debut in the late 1980s. The return centred on ‘I Am Who I Am’, written in 2003. Gutmanis has traced the idea partly to Helen Reddy’s ‘I Am Woman’, which had affected her strongly as a child. She wanted a similarly direct song for queer liberation, and her studies in sexual diversity at the University of Toronto fed into the writing.

She travelled to Wilmington, North Carolina, in August 2007 to record ‘I Am Who I Am’ and ‘Let It Slide’ with producer and engineer Karen Kane at Audio Genesis. Tony Mallard played drums, Danny Pera bass, Steve Horrell guitar and Donnie White additional keyboards, with Gutmanis singing and playing keyboards. Additional recording and mixing were done at the North Bend Room, and João Carvalho mastered the songs in Toronto. The two-song I Am Who I Am release followed in 2008.

‘I Am Who I Am’ brought Gutmanis into an international network of LGBTQ+ independent musicians and radio programmers. The song took the 2009 Pride Song Award at the Pride In The Arts Awards, presented on March 21, 2010, and was nominated for Best Song So Far at the RightOUT TV Music and Video Awards. Queer music historian and broadcaster JD Doyle called it an LGBT anthem and kept the recording in rotation on his programs. Gutmanis went on to perform in the United States, including PrideFest Milwaukee in 2010, while the song circulated on LGBTQ+, women’s and independent radio.

Her next full-length project reached back into her life as a songwriter. Glimmer In The Dark, released through Ban-Anna Records on July 3, 2012, collected material written across close to thirty years. The title song went back more than a quarter-century, and ‘The Rain’ dated from her teens. Other songs took up relationships, queer identity, bullying, parenthood, work, exhaustion and the demands of middle age. Gutmanis sequenced the record as a personal journey running from the present back toward her earliest songwriting.

Karen Kane produced and engineered Glimmer In The Dark at Chalet Studio in Claremont, Ontario, with mixing by Dajaun Martineau and Kane at Phase One Audio Group in Toronto. Gutmanis brought in a large group of musicians, among them Wayne DeAdder, Dan Neill, Karen Dinardo, Colleen Allen, Roly Platt, Alyssa Wright and Terry Nash. The record moves between bluesy rock, piano pop, Caribbean rhythms, gospel and jazz-inflected arrangements. Jaimie Vernon described it as a musical record of Gutmanis’s life over three decades, and other reviews at the time picked out her deep voice, her keyboard playing and the range of the arrangements.

The album did well on independent and LGBTQ+ radio. Glimmer In The Dark finished at number one on the 2013 OutVoice Top Twenty CD Chart, and ‘Another Way Out’ reached number three on that organization’s year-end song chart. Music from the record also appeared on Australian independent radio charts and Roots Music Report listings.

‘Another Way Out’ had a life beyond the album. Written from the viewpoint of a queer teenager facing bullying and isolation, it became a short film directed by Simone Stock. The film premiered at Toronto’s Queer West Film Festival in August 2014 and went on to screen in the United States and Europe. It won Best Short Documentary at QCinema, Fort Worth’s International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, in October 2014, and PFLAG later used it as an educational resource.

Two further singles followed on February 11, 2014. ‘Lately It’s Cold’ leans on blues, while ‘Diamonds and Stiletto Shoes’, with lyrics co-written by Georgia Wilder, sets pop writing against a ska-influenced rhythm. Karen Kane produced both at Number 9 Recording Studios in Toronto, with Bob Cohen on guitar, Roger Travassos on drums and Karen Dinardo on backing vocals. ‘Diamonds and Stiletto Shoes’ entered the Independent Music Network Mainstream Top 30 and the OutVoice Top Ten, and ‘Lately It’s Cold’ later received a Global Music Award.

That year also brought Gutmanis back regularly to one of the rooms from her earliest career. She started the bi-monthly ‘Anna Gutmanis & Friends’ series at the Free Times Café with guitarist Bob Cohen, vocalist Karen Dinardo and harmonica player Bryn Scott-Grimes, inviting other performers to sit in. She had first played the room in 1985 and launched her debut there in 1989.

In 2014 Gutmanis also took part in Artists for a Better City, joining nine other Toronto musicians to record ‘We Need Olivia’ in support of Olivia Chow’s Toronto mayoral campaign.

In 2017 she went back to the 1984 L’Étranger sessions and reissued ‘Empire’ digitally through TuneCore. Her reason was plain. The racism and sexism the song addressed had not gone away, and she felt the recording still had something to say.

She revisited ‘I Am Who I Am’ in 2019. Gutmanis had begun wondering during Toronto Pride what the song might sound like as dance music, and Brian Gagnon and Karen Kane produced a new treatment. ‘I Am Who I Am (2019 Dance Version)’ came out on June 22, 2019, and Gutmanis performed at the Toronto Dyke March in Allan Gardens to mark the release. Davina Hader directed the video, which took a 2020 TINFF award for Best LGBTQ Film (Canada), presented in November 2021, along with a Women’s Film award from Cult Critic Film Magazine and selection by the White Unicorn International Film Festival.

By this period Gutmanis’s community work had taken several forms outside her own recording. She was involved with Girls Rock Camp and PFLAG, and she served with the INSPIRE Awards, writing ‘Inspire’ as the organization’s theme song for its tenth anniversary. She recorded it with producer and multi-instrumentalist James Atin-Godden at Blanketfort Studio and Silverthorn Studios in Toronto, and the single was released on May 14, 2021.

Gutmanis also founded Artists 4 Racial Equality, a collective bringing musicians and visual artists together around anti-racism work. Its major project was ‘Breonna’, written by Gutmanis and recorded with Bryn Scott-Grimes, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Jade Elektra, Karen Dinardo, Stephen Stanley and James Atin-Godden. The song and the accompanying film, directed by Cailleah Scott-Grimes, memorialized Breonna Taylor. The production used work by Toronto graffiti artists and was filmed partly in Graffiti Alley on Queen Street. Released in 2021, the film screened in Canada, Europe and South Africa and won Best Music Video at the Toronto International Women’s Film Festival in 2022.

Gutmanis also works in photography and visual art, contributing artwork and design to her own releases and bringing music and moving images together. Alternative Toronto holds an Anna Gutmanis Collection of posters and other material covering her Toronto music history from the early 1980s onward, a rare archival record of an independent musician whose earliest work got little mainstream coverage at the time.

Music and visual work came together in Oh Catnada!. Gutmanis wrote ‘Oh Catnada’ in early 2024 and recorded it with James Atin-Godden that May, then built a story around the song and drew a series of cat illustrations. Casper Flatman directed the resulting animated short, released in September 2024, with Gutmanis supplying the song, story, script, narration and much of the visual material for a feline country with its own anthem. The film won Best Music in Short at the Niagara Falls International Short Festival in January 2025 and took the Golden Soundtrack Award at the Golden Short Film Festival. It screened at the Toronto Short Film Festival in March 2025 and the Winnipeg International Feline Film Festival that June, and drew nominations from the Tokyo International Cinema Awards, FilmHaus Berlin, the Indiemania Prague Film Awards and YETI FilmFest.

Oh Catnada! then entered the eighth New York Cat Film Festival, which premiered at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater on October 26, 2025 and toured American cities through 2026. Gutmanis has tied the project to animal welfare, noting that the cat-film events direct part of their ticket proceeds to local animal organizations.

Gutmanis remains active as a songwriter and performer. In 2026 she announced another recording with James Atin-Godden, with a video for the new song in development. Oh Catnada! continued its festival tour, she drew ‘catified’ logos for the host cities, she sang at Roncesvalles United Church’s Pride service in June, and her art postcards went on sale at Le Miaousée, which bills itself as Canada’s first permanent cat museum and opened in Montréal in July.

-Robert Williston