Albums That Loved Me Back #3

Antony & The Johnsons: I Am a Bird Now

In 1968, Candy Darling, a young New York drag queen, appears in Andy Warhol's Flesh. Andy introduces Candy to Lou Reed of The Velvet Underground, who writes and records a song about her, "Candy Says". In the 1990's, Lou befriends Antony Hegarty, an androgynous singer and founding member of Blacklips Performance Cult. Lou takes Antony on a couple of world tours as a backup singer. Antony's band is named after Martha Johnson, the drag queen who is credited with starting the 1969 riot at the Stonewall Inn. Their second album, I Am a Bird Now, released February 8, 2005, features Lou Reed on one track and Peter Hujar's deathbed photograph of Candy Darling on the cover.

I have always been fascinated with connections and influences and collaborations in music. As one could imagine, the rich historical context in which I Am a Bird Now is embedded makes me drool. But even taken completely out of context, the album approaches perfection. Within weeks of its release, it shot directly into my top five favorite albums ever released.

I Am a Bird Now is about intermediate spaces, androgyny, ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty, fear of and hope for the future, and bittersweet reflections on the past. Above all, Antony meditates on transfigurations: childhood to adulthood, manhood to womanhood, life to death. It is fitting, then, that Candy Darling graces the cover, having undergone two of these and on the precipice of the third.

Antony's voice is what most critics have focused on. He isn't the most technically competent singer, but his voice is smooth, genderless, and naturally appealing. He sounds simultaneously terrified and confident, joyful and despairing. But his songwriting is the real treat. It is the songs that give his voice a chance to show what it can do.

"Oh I'm scared of the middle place between light and nowhere," Antony declares in the first track, "Hope There's Someone". Not one to let fear rule him, he spends much of the remainder of the album exploring and charting the "middle place" for the listener. In "For Today I Am a Boy", Antony describes growing up in the wrong body and desperately wishing for a new one. He laments that "I was born old, not a girl and not a jewel" in "Spiralling". After struggling to accept his true nature he finally finds salvation in "Bird Girl": "I've been searching for my wings some time... I'm gonna be borne into soon the sky, 'cause I'm a bird girl and the bird girls go to heaven."

I Am a Bird Now reeks of soul when most music, particularly outwardly gay-themed music, was completely devoid of it. Unabashedly emotional but completely sincere, the album was completely unlike anything that had been released by a gay artist in a recent memory, perhaps unlike anything ever released by anyone. The genre of torch songs has largely been ignored by gay men of the younger generations, too femme or too over-the-top or just plain unnecessary at a time when gay is synonymous with normal to a growing segment of the mainstream. Its remnants can be found in tacky, unoriginal drag shows and gay-themed comedies like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I Am a Bird Now, however, reminds us why torch songs were once a legitimate art form. Antony has managed to make them relevant again, even to the musical mainstream that once mocked Jobriath and Klaus Nomi for their flamboyance. Hopefully, I Am a Bird Now will have the same effect on younger gay men, who now mock one another for any peceived deviation from a pretense of masculinity.