Mark Stefanos
When anees takes the stage at the Globe Theatre, this Saturday, Aug. 22, for the Los Angeles stop on The Lucky Duck Tour, it will mark another chapter in a relationship with the city that he’s been building for years. Since 2022, the singer, rapper and songwriter has staged five free shows on the Santa Monica beach, drawing thousands of fans. Those gatherings have grown alongside his career into a recurring tradition that has become central to how he thinks about music and community.
“I think this is probably the city and the community that I’ve done the best job of investing my personal time with,” he tells LA Weekly. “And I think that fans from certain areas recognize that. They know when you’ve put in work to build a relationship with them — not just to have fans, but to build a relationship with them.”
The beach shows began just as anees was taking his career to the next level. With his first one in January of 2022, he thought five people might come — about 50 people showed up. The next month, roughly 300 came. By May, he had more than 1,000 people gathered on the sand. He would come back in 2023 and 2025 drawing even more. He called the gatherings “the reincarnation of summer camp,” a description that would prove to be fitting for an artist whose work has increasingly centered on the idea of creating a place where people can feel connected.
For anees, that connection has become the foundation of a career that has been built entirely independently on the strength of his magnetic personality, soulful music, and the intimate, look-you-in-the-eye-real relationships he builds with his audience.
anees began releasing songs in 2020, building a following through social media and performances from his car. For many listeners, his music came into their lives with “sun and moon,” the guitar-driven love song he released in April 2022.
The track became his breakthrough, eventually reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Philippines Songs chart and making anees the first international artist and the first English-language song to reach the top of the chart. A Filipino musician, JRoa, had recorded a Tagalog open verse that helped propel the song on TikTok before the two collaborated on an official remix.
The success was difficult to predict. When asked what he thinks caused “sun and moon” to connect so strongly in the Philippines, anees pauses. “Zero clue.” Then: “God.”
(Photo: Ethan Vovan @ethanvovan)
I press him, and he offers a theory. “My music — how sing-alongable it is, how simple it is, and how vocal-forward it is — I understand why the people with the best voices in the world, the Filipinos, would embrace it,” he says. “How it became so beloved in that country, only God knows.”
The song’s success came after years of work. Before “sun and moon,” there was “slip,” the romantic 2021 single that drew Justin Bieber’s attention. Bieber unexpectedly joined one of anees’ Instagram Live sessions, where the two talked about music, faith and their wives. After the Bieber appearance, he gained more than 10,000 followers in roughly 30 minutes. The moment accelerated anees’s trajectory, but the groundwork had been laid long before the livestream.
Born Anees Mokhiber, anees grew up in Northern Virginia in a household where music was everywhere. His parents played Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, the Beatles and Frank Zappa alongside Arab music, pop, rap, R&B, soul, funk and jazz. “My dad and my mom are hippies,” he says. “They just loved music, and it was always playing.”
His father’s family has Lebanese Orthodox roots stretching back more than a century in the United States. His mother’s family has a more recent Palestinian history — his mother was the first of her siblings born in the United States, while her four older siblings were born in Palestine.
His mother speaks Arabic fluently, but his father’s side did not. “But my dad has almost reversed the tide and has really swung back in the direction of embracing every element of his roots, which is why our household was so passionate about embracing our roots,” anees notes.
Hip-hop became another formative influence. His sister’s CDs introduced him to Lauryn Hill, Nas, Mos Def, 50 Cent and Eminem, followed by Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole. “I listened to every different type of hip-hop. But I think I was naturally drawn to the wordsmiths, to the ones that really used words as a magic wand. And I really soaked that up from them.”
He studied philosophy and sociology at George Mason University, graduating in 2014, then continued at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, graduating in 2017. “I went from student loan debt to student loan debt,” he says with a laugh.
While his legal career materialized, music kept calling, and anees has described freestyling as a way of working through a difficult period after law school.
(Photo: Ethan Vovan @ethanvovan)
The idea of community runs through nearly every part of anees’ career, and he traces much of it to summer camp. He spent five years as a camp counselor. His first album, summer camp, drew directly from those experiences, and he has described camp as a place where he learned about freedom, self-love and the kind of deep connection he wanted to recreate through music.
The current tour is called the Lucky Duck Tour, named after the rubber ducks anees throws into the audience — a spontaneous bit that has become a recurring ritual. “It has become a sensation,” he says. “Just by throwing a rubber duck in their direction, I can transport a grown man to their childhood”
It’s an effective tool because it taps into something anees takes seriously: the strange intimacy of performing for people who may have never met him.
“My summer camp upbringing is what really trained my mind and my heart and soul to seek connection — deep connection,” he says. “It’s not just about saying hi to my fans. It’s about looking into their eyes and seeing them.”
He describes that connection in almost spiritual terms. “No matter how many shows I do, it’s never gonna feel normal to me that people that I’ve never met know every word to a song that I wrote,” he says. “That is divine. That is God-given.”
(Photo: Ethan Vovan @ethanvovan)
anees’s independence is one of the more consequential parts of his story, particularly because he connects it directly to his creative and political freedom. This weekend’s LA show was produced entirely independently by anees and his team without intermediaries. They rented the venue and sold tickets directly to fans. “I don’t trust a lot of people, and I definitely don’t trust 99% of the music industry,” he says.
When anees first went viral, record labels flooded his inbox. The offers didn’t appeal to him. When his team communicated that, he recalls being told that he could either let the labels help him grow or remain where he was, alone.
“And I think we’ve proven that to be false,” he says.
But his definition of independence leaves room for collaboration. He works with Indify and with EMPIRE for distribution and publishing, while maintaining control over his creative decisions.
“I don’t believe in DIY,” he says. “Do it yourself — it’s impossible. You could do it yourself, but what you’re doing is gonna be limited. I have bigger goals than that.”
For anees, the important question is whether the people around him share his values.
“The bigger my team is — that’s not the goal. It’s the more aligned my team is,” he says.
His legal background gives him another layer of control. He has an attorney who represents him, but he also reads his own contracts as a useful defense against deals that could compromise his independence. “Because of my legal background, I can sniff out bullshit when I see it,” he says. “I can see the traps at a 30,000-foot view.”
That freedom has become particularly meaningful as he has spoken publicly about Palestine. anees is a signatory of Artists4Ceasefire, a collective calling for a permanent ceasefire and humanitarian aid in Gaza. In September 2024, he also appeared alongside MC Abdul on Macklemore’s “Hind’s Hall 2,” a protest song supporting Palestinians.
anees says he has lost opportunities because of his political positions. His independence, he argues, gives him the financial room to absorb those consequences.
“Even with speaking up about Palestine, even with standing ten toes down for humanity, even with losing a lot of opportunities because of that — because I’m independent, I’ll be all right,” he says. “I’m not eating a small slice of my own pie. Because I’m independent, I have the lion’s share. And that financial freedom affords me the freedom to speak up, knowing that if I lose partners, I’ll be okay.”
(Photo: Ethan Vovan @ethanvovan)
That philosophy also explains why the idea of representation matters to him. Performing now as a Palestinian-Lebanese artist has given him a chance to change that experience for someone else.
“When I was little, part of the reason why I didn’t get into music right away is because nobody looked like me,” he says. “Hopefully my existence in this space tells the next generation of little Arab kids, little Palestinian, little Lebanese kids, that they do belong in this space,” he says. “They do belong on stage, and it is something that the world wants from them.”
The Lucky Duck Tour began Aug. 14 in Seattle and will run for roughly two months, with 27 shows before concluding in Washington, D.C. anees says the setlist will divide its attention between older favorites and newer songs, including “butterfly,” “cinderella,” “man on the moon” and “my baby.”
He says his next album, camp crush, will arrive in 2027, the third chapter in an ongoing “summer camp” universe.
He also plans to finally visit the Philippines in April 2027, five years after “sun and moon” became a phenomenon there. He is considering shows in Manila, Cebu and Quezon City, with the possibility of expanding into other Southeast Asian markets.
For now, though, LA is the next stop. The Globe Theatre show is another step up from those early beach gatherings, while carrying the same basic premise: bring people together, make them feel seen, and give them a place to belong.
anees traces that instinct back to his mother: “My mom is so loving, so joyful. There’s not an ounce of hate in her body. It’s all rhythm, melody, love, laughter. She’s overwhelmingly loving. And I think that because of that — that’s the foundation I was raised on. So that’s just what I am. I am love. I am melody. I am rhythm. I am laughter. And it’s because of my mom and my dad.”
Then, with a characteristic turn toward the spiritual, he adds: “A woman’s aura is the most powerful thing in the world. And my mom’s aura is that of rhythm and melody.”
While anees’s career has grown far beyond the audience he had when he was freestyling in his car, his basic ambition remains the same:
“If I’m always known as an artist of the people, that to me is the greatest accomplishment.”
Follow anees on Instagram @anees and at aneesofficial.com.
anees on the August 21, 2026, cover of LA Weekly. (Photo: Nathan Hong @nathan_hongk; cover design: Mark Stefanos)