Antony's Amazing Transformation

Last October, Antony Hegarty performed with a full orchestra at the Apollo Theater. Like James Brown, Antony knows how to make an entrance — though in his case, it involved wearing what looked like a full-length white wedding dress. Antony is six-feet-two, with a moon-shaped face, soft features and stringy hair that hangs to his shoulders. People are often struck by his size, especially in contrast to his voice, a haunting moan quavering with vibrato that recalls Nina Simone but really has few precedents. He encored with a mordant cover of Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love." When he performed the song in Sweden, he noted afterward, "Who says I'm not a teenage girl?"

Antony — who became a critical and hipster favorite with his 2005 breakthrough, I Am a Bird Now — resists discussing his sexuality with much specificity. But since he was a child, he's known that he was transgender. "It was obvious," he says. "It's no secret when you're gender-variant as a kid. It's clear to you, to your family, to your community, that you're swimming against the tide." Today, at a vegetarian diner in New York's East Village, his only sartorial nod to femininity is a black and white neck scarf, which he's wearing over a blue cardigan. Several songs on I Am a Bird Now, recorded with his band, the Johnsons, dealt overtly with themes of transformation and escape. The music, mostly quiet piano and strings, sounded as fragile as Antony's vocals — so sad, at times, it feels like a violation to be listening in.

Somewhat astoundingly, Antony's new album, The Crying Light, is even more emotionally intense. If I Am a Bird Now was primarily about the singer's relationship with his own body, The Crying Light is about his relationship with the earth, which he sees as essentially feminine and, not surprisingly, consistently defiled by a male-dominated society. "I think a lot of theologies were obsessed with the idea of separating us from our dependence on the natural world and repositioning our dependence on some abstract sky god," Antony says. "Nature was something innately feminine and innately evil — the Eve element. It's the male archetype inside us all, which has gone completely crazy for at least 2,000 years and now has taken our entire ecosystem to the brink of collapse." The best of the new songs, the devastating "Another World," encapsulates the album as a whole. Backed by spare piano and ghostly electronic effects, Antony sounds as if he's singing a suicide note ("I need another world....Gonna miss you all"), though it becomes clear he's mourning the death not of himself but of the earth.