FEATURE:
You Are My Sister
Anthony and The Johnsons’ I Am a Bird Now at Twenty
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MAYBE this album…
will pass some people by. The twentieth anniversary of one of the best albums of the 2000s (the first decade of this century). Anthony of the Johnsons (now ANOHNI and The Johnsons) is an American collective led by ANOHNI. Her amazing collaborators. ANOHNI (Anohni Hegarty, formerly Anthony Hegarty) is a West Sussex-born artist who began her musical career performing with an ensemble of New York musicians as Antony and the Johnsons. The group’s self-titled debut was released in 2000. The amazing follow-up, I Am a Bird Now, was released on 1st February, 2005. I want to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. It rightfully and deservedly won the Mercury Prize in 2005. In 2016, ANOHNI became the first openly transgender performer nominated for an Academy Award. Her most recent studio album, 2023’s My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, was hugely acclaimed. I Am a Bird Now features guest appearances by, among others, Rufus Wainwright, Devendra Banhart, Joan Wasser and Boy George. To mark twenty years of this phenomenal album that won awards and the heart of critics, I am going to bring in some reviews. I cannot see any features published where we get background to the album and its creation. I will instead bring in three reviews for an astonishing work. Technically it should be I Am a Bird Now by ANOHNI and The Johnsons but, as the album was released in 2005 and the group was Anthony and The Johnsons, I am referring to it as that.
The first review I want to bring in is from Pitchfork. Published when the album was released, it mesmerised and blew away critics and listeners alike. Twenty years later and the songs still sound so moving and effecting. It is a singular work that is truly mesmeric. I do hope it gets some renewed appreciation ahead of its twentieth anniversary:
“The 1974 photo of Andy Warhol superstar Candy Darling on the cover of Antony and the Johnsons' second full length, I Am a Bird Now, is the perfect complement to the ghostly hymnals that flit and sigh behind its black and white shadows. A melancholy but arrestingly beautiful image, it depicts Darling on her deathbed; bright flowers float behind her upturned arm like a cluster of soft, pale moons radiating light onto the bleached sea of sheets in which she's drowning.
Besides being a tight aesthetic move, the image also links Antony to the early fabulousness of downtown New York, reminding the informed viewer not only of Darling's too-early death from leukemia, but the AIDS-related passing of the photographer himself, Peter Hujar in 1987 (the same year Warhol died, following routine gall bladder surgery). Klaus Nomi was already buried by then, and the Downtown scene was getting too close to saying goodbye to Cookie Mueller, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, and Antony's sometime doppelganger Leigh Bowery (the subject of Boy George's musical Taboo), among others-- all victims of the AIDS virus.
This visual meditation on death and radical history smoothly conjures the family tree upon which pale, angelic Antony perches. The vocalist/pianist moved from California to NYC after seeing the documentary Mondo New York, lured by the 1980s cabaret scene it depicted. Quite fittingly, his first performance came with a musical troupe called Blacklips at the famed Downtown venue, the Pyramid. Jump now to 2003, when Antony opened for Lou Reed and sang the Velvet Underground classic "Candy Says" (yes, for Candy Darling) as an encore after most performances. Knowing all of this-- the very important history in that cover-- helps to understand the melancholy, sense of loss, and rapturous joy in these 10 tracks.
But however aesthetically intriguing and complex that history may be, the ultimate draw is Antony's voice, and within the first two seconds of the album, it should be very clear to even the most unaware newbies that Antony has an amazing Nina Simone/Brian Ferry/Jimmy Scott vibrato, a multi-octave siren that would sound painfully lovely no matter what he was saying. Lucky for us, he fills that promise with worthy syllables. The greatness of this downcast crooner is the melding of that otherworldly trill with a dark, powerful aesthetic. Looking past his sad eye make-up and kewpie-doll features are these mesmerizing songs about loving dead boys, plaintive letters from hermaphroditic children, the fear of dark lonesome purgatories, breast amputation, the fluidity of gender. The first words of "Hope There's Someone" and of the album "Hope there's someone who'll take care of me/ When I die" feel more lonesome than just about anything and then there's the rapturous promise of "For Today I Am A Boy"' that "One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful woman/ One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful girl".
I Am a Bird Now's majesty didn't come easily: Antony's self-titled debut was released five years ago on David Tibet's Durtro label, but only now has he found the perfect mix between style and substance. More stripped down than earlier offerings-- most of the focus is on piano and voice, although violin, viola, cello, sax, and flute are also heard-- there's no missing Antony's thoughtful words.
There are a number of guest vocal spots-- Devendra Banhart (gypsy incantations in the beginning of "Spiralling"), Boy George ("You Are My Sister"), Rufus Wainwright ("What Can I Do?"). All of these powerful singers are overshadowed by Antony's angelic chops, though Boy George ends up turning in a surprisingly moving performance. His duet with Antony explores private memory, brotherhood/sisterhood (regardless of gender), relationships, empowerment ("I was so afraid of the night/ You seem to move to places/ That I feared"), and wish fulfillment. (Really, grab the hankies.)”.
As Tiny Mix Tapes begin – and as many reviewers and fans have also expressed -, I Am a Bird Now is an overwhelming album. Maybe there have been albums as powerful since, though in 2005, I don’t think we had heard anything quite like it for many years. A hugely deserving victor at the 2005 Mercury Prize ceremony:
“I'm completely overwhelmed by this record. I Am a Bird Now is beyond any semi-confectionary aesthetic distance that you might bring to discussing your average album. This music grabs a hold of you and doesn't let go. It feels timeless and gorgeous and bigger than life. It may not be "soul" in the strict, music appreciation 101 sense, but it could make even the most jaded atheist approach a metaphysical regard. It is assured, seering and majestic SOUL to the utmost. I'd put on my critic's cap and dive into scrutiny, but I am too enraptured by this artist's music.
For some reason my CD of I Am a Bird Now is skipping and every skip is like a dagger in the heart. The pure unadulterated emotion on display decries such tedious interruptions. I never thought I could appreciate Boy George till I heard him singing with Antony on the impossibly touching "You Are My Sister." And there is no point in dwelling on the gender bending (I didn't even want to acknowledge it, to tell you the truth) aspects of the artist because his songs are so 'universally' moving. Whereas Antony and The Johnsons was a stark, chilling affair that was arresting and perhaps a little disconcerting, this album is a shining beacon of hope and healing amidst ceaseless pangs of heartache and loss. The gospel-tinged "Fistful of Love" brings in a horn section and Lou Reed for a particularly uplifting experience that bridges the middle of the album splendidly.
I have to see Antony perform these songs. It's not a question of the recorded material not being enough, but I could see the breathtaking sweep of these songs taking on a whole new power in a live setting. I'm reminded of the scene in Mulholland Dr. where the two principal characters are in the theater listening to Rebecca Del Rio's heart-rending solo version of Roy Orbisons "Crying." I love this scene so much; how incredibly heavy it feels. I understood completely why they cried, and probably did a little myself. What's interesting is the one thing that kept the whole thing from utter hokeyness was that the song was sung in Spanish.
In this sense, I Am a Bird Now is authentic and moving because it hits you in ways that are both recognizable and foreign. Like Nina Simone, Antony has this uncanny ability to take your standard blues progression and give it authority that skips whatever reservations and preconceptions the audience might lean toward and aims directly for their empathy and, ultimately, their belief in the innate, transcendent force music can contain”.
The third and final review I am bringing in is from The Observer. I Am a Bird Now does not get enough airplay and attention now. As ANOHNI has her own solo career, I don’t know how she feels about a former incarnation. A very different artist in 2005, I do hope she has fond memories of that experience and album. It is clear I Am a Bird Now has changed people’s lives:
“It hit me in the most prosaic of circumstances, alone at the kitchen table, late on a Friday night, in semi-darkness, I Am a Bird Now flooding from the speakers, the family asleep upstairs; but it hit me nonetheless and I felt a bit like the dead Thomas Chatterton in Henry Wallis's famous Pre-Raphaelite painting, which is not a particularly familiar sensation: I was in love with Antony and perhaps also the Johnsons.
As far as confessionals go, this isn't particularly troublesome - the group may feature guests such as Rufus Wainwright and Boy George, as well as Lou Reed and Devendra Banhart, and the record includes a song titled after a line from a poem by Marc Almond ('Fistful of Love'), but if my fandom suggests some hitherto unsuspected personal proclivities, well, so what? But the revelation was unexpected - such a strange, moving and glorious record, and one I suspect with fantastic appeal to a wider audience, which is still not something that can often be said of recordings by sometime performance artists with more than a shade of the Leigh Bowerys about them, particularly by someone with no prior keen interest in issues of gender identity.
Born in London, Antony was relocated to California at the age of 10, before settling in New York as a young man in 1990, with an ambition to become 'a transvestite chanteuse at 3am nightclubs bathed in blue light, like Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet', and this is as helpful an archetype as any; perhaps also Scott Walker, or Nina Simone, or Bryan Ferry or mid-Seventies Bowie, or Sam Cooke or Jimmy Scott or a medieval chorister, because Antony sounds like all of the above, but always himself.
It is his vibrato and multi-octave voice (often double-tracked) that stuns you from the first few bars on in, putting the washing-up on permanent hold. He is obviously the most original vocalist we've heard since Bjork, and never less than wholly affecting as he goes about eclipsing the impressive contributions of his guests.
The mood is predominantly mournful, but in its dulcet softness, luxuriously so. Cellos, violins, violas and flutes are used to frame Antony's voice and piano, and torch songs such as 'My Lady Story' feel exquisitely sad. Even then, it's only after several listens that attention is directed to the words, which in this instance seem to tell of transsexual woe: 'My lady's story is one of annihilation,' it begins. 'My lady's story is one of breast -amputation.'
But there's also an uplifting quality to what might be the highlight of the album, 'For Today I Am a Boy', which has much in common with black gospel music, both in style and in its sense of a quest for redemption. 'One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful woman...,' Antony sings with assured and powerful conviction, 'but for today I am a child, for today I am a boy.
'One day I'll grow up and feel the power within me, one day I'll grow up, of this I'm sure.'
Presumably, the song is at some level autobiographical, and as such is deeply moving. But possibly, it might also be read as a more general invocation of the feminine spirit, and that's some measure of Antony's facility as a songwriter as well as performer.
Likewise 'Fistful of Love', driven on by horns straight out of a Muscle Shoals soul classic, which could be the stuff of a bad Julian Clary joke, but really emerges, like this rest of this remarkable album, as a Valentine to the world at large”.
Released on 1st February, 2005 in the U.S., a Deluxe Pressing was released in the U.K. on 7th February. Whatever format you have it on, make sure you spend some time with I Am a Bird Now. Everyone will have their favourite songs from the album. Perhaps You Are My Sister is top of my list, though I also really like My Lady Story. An overwhelming and sense-changing listening experience, it is hard to believe I Am a Bird Now is twenty. It has not dated and doesn’t suffer the fate of many other albums from 2005. The production or lyrics seeming dated. I Am a Bird Now is a beautiful thing that continues to…
SOAR proudly and freely.