![]() Along with the ecstatic characters, though, Antony was also exposed to a subculture with its own specialized sadness and depression, and that is what appears on I Am a Bird Now."Edge of Seventeen" (Previously unreleased live version) "They did a lot of ecstatic theater, and that was a vibe I was very much interested in," he explains. ![]() She was so far out there, so beautiful." There's a photo of her on the inside of the CD booklet, which has exquisite artwork that drops multiple hints about the album's content, and its emotional heft: close-ups of a calendar with dates scratched off it from an abandoned Philadelphia prison cell, Peter Hujar's photo of transgendered Warhol superstar Candy Darling on her deathbed, and a heartbreaking artifact of gender-reassignment therapy from the 1960s.Īntony knows a lot about the history of drag and transgendered performance, having studied at NYU in the early '90s with Martin Worman, a former writer for the groundbreaking San Francisco drag troupe the Cockettes. ![]() On "Hope There's Someone," the opening track, Antony sings, "Hope there's someone who will take care of me when I die," then says simply that he's "scared of the middle place between light and nowhere." The album is dedicated to the memory of performance artist Page, an East Village icon Antony describes as "sort of a Surrealist, a white Grace Jones, a transsexual star who was a great inspiration to so many And I never cry-I'm a big, straight white guy with no emo in me.Īntony's music is imbued with death as well. The album's emotional peak comes on "My Lady Story," a tale of breast-cancer survival that makes me cry. In fact, you could think of it as the exact flipside of high camp. Bird is devastating in its sincerity, not merely audacious or camp. I wanted it to be a song cycle that clipped things that seemed essential."Īnd the song cycle works. "I feel like it's a dense record," Antony says. It's strong enough to hold the record together, while loose enough to evade the trappings of "concept" albums. The arrangements are exquisite throughout, from the sighing strings on "My Lady Story" to the swaying white soul horns on "Fistful." There are celebrity appearances here, but they're handled with such grace it's downright weird.Ī narrative, loosely related to the bending and the transformation of gender, runs through I Am a Bird Now. I wanted to make this album more intimate, and thankfully by the time we recorded it, I'd been playing with these musicians for five years, so we could do that."Īntony has packed his band with all-stars from the kind of music scene that's filled with people who studied music theory at college (i.e., not indie rock), including Rasputina founder Julia Kent and Rufus Wainwright's pianist, Jason Hart. "It had a 'high feeling,' a very dramatic sound. "The first album is more theatrical and was my first stab at working with musicians in a studio," Antony explained via his cell phone while on tour somewhere in Canada. The star is Antony's voice itself, an androgynous vibrato soaked in emotion that has garnered comparisons to Nina Simone, Bryan Ferry and Little Jimmy Scott. The tenderest love song is called "Fistful of Love," after all. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's not really meant to be. But it's this new album that sounds like it's being sung in a dark, velvet-adorned club. It's no surprise to learn that the strange, sultry songs on that album had their origins in after-hours plays performed at New York City's Pyramid Club. Bird is a vast improvement over the band's self-titled 1998 debut, which is saying a lot. ![]() Like all musical masterpieces, this album is likely to offend the ears at first, but after a few listens a true judgment can be made. It's called I Am a Bird Now by (you guessed it) Antony and the Johnsons. I know it's just now March, but the best record of the year, hands down, has already been released. I speak of the visionary, New York-based singer-songwriter-pianist Antony and the art-cabaret stylings of his band, the Johnsons. This week, Portland is graced with one of these songbirds whose fluttery, angelic voice will absolutely gong your soul, if you let it all the way in there. One of the loveliest songs from the entire, gorgeous 1970s, it has a chorus that goes, "The songbirds are singing/ Like they know the score/ And I love you…like never before." I've always heard "Songbird" as a musical talisman, a soothing meta-lullaby about the power of a special kind of musician to console, and maybe even heal. You know that tune "Songbird" by Fleetwood Mac? It's by Christine McVie, but it's as light and wispy as those dresses Stevie Nicks used to float around the stage in.
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