“I am just so bored by everything. You might say bored to death. Did you know I couldn’t last. I always knew it. I wish I could meet you all again.”
Candy Darling can only be described as an icon. A lifetime lover of old Hollywood, Candy moved to Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s and became one of Andy Warhol’s Superstars and the inspiration for artists ranging from Lou Reed to the Rolling Stones to Truman Capote. Her visibility as a trans woman was as radical then as it is now.
By 24, she was a bona fide film star in Warhol’s irreverent Flesh. By 29, she was dead from leukemia.
That’s her on her deathbed staring out from the cover of Antony and the Johnsons’ sophomore record I Am a Bird Now, supine with flowing locks and a look of weary acceptance. There are flowers surrounding her and a single rose against her stomach. The immediate references the photo makes — to death and life, gender and identity, youth and beauty — are all explored in I Am a Bird Now, often to devastating effect. Sung in otherworldly tones by Anohni, then known as Antony, the record’s theatricality and fearless exploration of gender dynamics and dysphoria present the realisation of the dreams of trans women like Candy and Marsha P. Johnson, the inspiration for the group’s name.
I Am a Bird Now is a complicated record made no simpler by its challenging lyrics. It is often poetic and evocative, as in the delicate “Spiralling,” or daringly straightforward, as in the loving tribute “You Are My Sister.” References to death and rebirth bookend the album, with opening track “Hope There’s Someone” — one of the most powerful songs ever written about the uncertainty of death — echoed through the vibrations of “Bird Gerhl,” with its cathartic visions of escape and emergence.
Those visions are inescapable in retrospect, as so many of the album’s themes and phrases seem to point towards Anohni’s transition as a trans woman. Speaking to Numéro, she noted that her name change was “like a rite of passage. It’s also a way for me to take note of the person I’ve become, of my life as it is today. The older I get, the closer I get to the person I really am. I’m building. I’m learning how to accept.” Now performing as a solo artist with a focus on political advocacy and an ethos she calls “future feminism,” the chrysalis of her evolving identity is easily found in the lyrics to songs such as “Today I Am a Boy”: “one day I’ll grow up and be a beautiful woman / one day I’ll grow up and be a beautiful girl.” Anohni’s womanhood should come as no shock to her devotees, who have always felt the tide of her femininity and irrepressible spirit shine through her lyrics and performances.
But it would be a mistake to cast I Am a Bird Now solely in the light of Anohni’s gender identity and queerness. “If I can only be framed as a gay artist, then my work is contained, it’s quarantined, and 90% of the time it’s dismissed by people outside that interest group,” she told The Quietus. “But that’s never really been the scope of my work.”
What’s so remarkable about the record is its universality: all of us can feel separated from our bodies and ourselves, afraid of death and change, falling in love with those who are no good for us. “I’m interested in this whole idea of how lonely everybody is. People really are minorities of one, everyone’s such an island, and there’s so many people,” she said in an interview with Pitchfork. “Why don’t we spend more time finding ways to enjoy things as a collective consciousness?” The protagonists of I Am a Bird Now are often lost and longing, and each song seems to end in some sort of release, whether it be the crescendoing piano of “Hope There’s Someone” or the horns and wails of “Fistful of Love.”
Anohni was born in West Sussex and moved to New York at age 19 to join an experimental theatre troupe. She sung in bars and at open mics while performing with the art collective Black Lips, formed with partner Johanna Constantine. “I moved to New York to be with weirdos who were organized, or where it was more of a united front,” she said. Inhabiting 14th Street on the border between Greenwich Village and Chelsea, she roamed like a ghost through a locale once known for its drag queens, sex workers, and leather. “That world was actually dying when I arrived in New York,” she told The Guardian. “I got there for the death.” She was eventually discovered by David Tibet of experimental group Current 93 while performing songs she had written with a group of musicians that came to be known as Antony and the Johnsons. Their first record, the striking Antony and the Johnsons, was a brash and expressive showcase for Anohni’s powerhouse vocals, an electric mix of her heroes Nina Simone, Kate Bush, and Boy George, the latter of whom lends his voice to one of the standout tracks of I Am a Bird Now.
Where the group’s sophomore record is often delicate and restrained, Antony and the Johnsons is larger than life, its theatricality more pronounced and luminescent. “[Our] first album is a reflection, a vision of the world, a landscape of the world,” she said in Brooklyn Vegan. Anohni stares out angelic from the cover, bathed in blue light and draped a negligee and arm-length gloves. One can feel reverberations of that album’s bombast in such moments as the outro of “Bird Gerhl,” but for the most part Antony and the Johnsons is unpolished and raw, an expression of unbridled talent that I Am a Bird Now would later refine and reinvent.
What makes I Am a Bird so much more fulfilling, and so much more palatable to a wider audience, can’t be narrowed down to a single factor. What is clear is that the record was enough of a crowd pleaser to garner awards such as the Mercury Prize, and to subsequently enter the homes of many listeners who would’ve never otherwise given the record a second glance. Anohni has spoken of using her music as a “Trojan horse” to put forth new and transgressive ideas to the masses, as she cloaks deep meditations in sweet tones and swooning melodies. This isn’t music for a privileged few — it reaches out to each listener with emotional depth and honesty.
Anohni told The Quietus that she aimed to make music “where emotion was validated or even heralded,” in response to a society wherein “emotion tends to be disregarded or looked down upon, subjugated as a system of perceiving.” I Am a Bird Now is revolutionary in its embrace of emotion, and its exploration of personal growth and redemption often feels like an act of self-care. Even in its most aggressive moments — the domestic abuse of “Fistful of Love” stands out — Anohni searches for emotional truth, sometimes to the detriment of her own well-being. What comes through is an album defined by its creator’s passion and willfulness.
Few moments on the album are more nakedly passionate than its opener, “Hope There’s Someone,” which remains the high water mark of Antony and the Johnsons’ discography. Taking a cue from the album’s cover artwork, the song is an exploration of life and death — more specifically, the space that separates the two. In her gentle warble, Anohni wonders if she will be taken care of in her final moments, before conjuring visions of a spectre on the limits of her own consciousness. The song’s piano gradually ascends until it’s hammering at keys as Anohni’s vocal becomes a howl that seems to compress an entire life into a single note. In keeping with the album’s themes, death and life are treated not as a binary but as a spectrum — one blurs into the other as easily as falling asleep, while spectres haunt you and the tide pulls you downwards.
“My Lady Story” is comparatively restrained, but no less moving. Anohni is backed up by cooing background vocals as she sings of the physical manifestations of gender: breast amputations, wombs full of water, shining eyes and lost beauty. The song has echoes of doo-wop and gospel in its use of multiple voices and repetition, while Anohni’s vibrato guides us through a narrative of metamorphosis.
Anohni’s most commanding vocal performance on the record is “For Today I Am a Boy,” which charts her blossoming gender identity through the lens of her growth from adolescence into adulthood. “One day I’ll grow up and be a beautiful woman,” she sings, “but for today, I am a child.” The song is one of the shortest on the record, coming in quick bursts of thundering piano and layered vocals. It’s empowering but melancholy, as Anohni recognises that she hasn’t yet become her ideal self.
“Man is the Baby” continues the trend of contrasting gender with age, as Anohni longs to be given the space to grow: “forgive me, let live me, set my spirit free.” Man is portrayed in infancy, a stepping stone in the path towards fully realised womanhood. A twinkling piano takes centre stage here, drifting away during an instrumental bridge before chiming in at the song’s final chorus. It’s almost like a bird call against Anohni’s throaty vocal.
The first of I Am a Bird Now’s several guest appearances comes in “You Are My Sister,” as Boy George puts in an impressive vocal performance. The song can be read either literally, as a touching tribute to a sibling, or as referring to a close connection with a friend or ally. Having charted her own, often challenging transformation in the record’s first half, it’s a relief to finally feel a supportive presence, as Boy George croons the song’s deceptively simple chorus: “you are my sister, and I love you.” Sisterhood, or supportive relationships between women in general, are too seldom represented in music, and the song’s earnestness is a breath of fresh air.
Rufus Wainwright continues the trend of Anohni enlisting voices as unconventional as her own, as he slow dances with a melody that swells into a pleading yelp: “mama, help me to live.” “What Can I Do” is the first of the album’s songs to use the metaphor of a bird’s flight, but it won’t be the last. The reedy tone of Wainwright’s voice is perfectly suited to the song’s theatrical spectacle, and Anohni only appears in the background, lifting his vocal into the clouds. The song is one of two interludes, neither of which clock beyond two minutes, but it marks a point of separation between the album’s two songs dedicated to the interpersonal rather than the intrapersonal, though the relationships at the centre couldn’t be more different.
“Fistful of Love” is arguably the most difficult song on the album, as it depicts a tortured relationship that could either be read as consensual BDSM or domestic abuse. Either way, Anohni’s partner is not forthcoming with his emotions, leading her to search for signs of affection in his “fists.” A growling Lou Reed, one of Anohni’s earliest and most ardent supporters, opens the song with a searching spoken word intro before a chiming electric guitar, hi-hat, and horns accompany Anohni’s restrained vocal. Like many songs on the album, “Fistful of Love” gradually gains steam until its electric guitar is wailing and its horns fill out the song’s high end. I Am a Bird Now is at its best when it examines how the physical and the emotional intermingle, and the song defies easy categorisation, depicting a complex relationship of blurred boundaries and domination.
Devendra Banhart’s cherubic coo opens “Spiralling,” a song equally as opaque as its predecessor. A ballad that sees Anohni confused and lost, its lyrics are just as chaotic, referencing everything from a fictional raven from JRR Tolkien’s series of fantasy novels to a religious order of monks from the 11th century. The song is unfocused, but perhaps intentionally so, full of imagery of loss and suffering. It’s of a piece with many of the album’s other songs, all of which see Anohni aching to find stable footing in a world that rejects her identity and selfhood.
“Free At Last” is the album’s only cover, as Anohni’s mentor Julia Yasuda — themselves an LGBT icon, and a tertiary member of the band — recites a slave spiritual most famous for being quoted in Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Opening with a morse code message that reminds of the whistle of a heart monitor, Yasuda’s unique delivery lends gravitas, connecting the song’s plight to Anohni’s own struggles as detailed throughout the album.
All of this culminates in “Bird Gerhl,” the album’s triumphant finish. Anohni leans into the aviary references sprinkled throughout the album, as she spreads her wings and embraces herself as she was meant to be. The song’s swelling strings come to a climax as Anohni pictures herself flying into the sunset, defiant and free. She is born again, independent and fully realised. The song’s instrumental is subtle, leaving room for Anohni to take centre stage while supporting her at every turn. It’s a perfect ending to a near perfect record, moving and revelatory.
I Am a Bird Now is compelling and radical, but in a decidedly delicate way. Anohni’s quiet strength throughout propels her journey towards self-identification in a way that’s both relatable to the listener and purely her own. The record is musically immaculate, with stunning piano lines and dramatic strings that give gravity to each phrase. You can see why it was so popular, despite its transgressive subject matter. These are songs that wear their heart on their sleeve in a way that’s impossible to ignore. You find yourself rooting for Anohni from the opening moments of “Hope There’s Someone” to the final piano outro of “Bird Gerhl,” leaving you breathlessly awaiting what the group will come up with next. (Their subsequent record The Crying Light, though less autobiographical, is also worth searching out.)
As Anohni told LA Record, “I think we spend a lot of time inhibiting. We’ve learned our whole lives how to inhibit our expression. To be the most microscopically contained, socially contained expression. I think singing and all the creative expressions give form to a more expansive expression as a human being.” What makes I Am a Bird Now so compelling is its openness, its bravery, its tireless belief in the power of the self. In a moment defined by oppression and delegitimization, no message could be more important.