Nature Boy

Four years ago, while on a promotional tour for the last Go-Betweens record, I came across Antony and the Johnsons' second album. I was in Amsterdam and had asked our local record-company rep how our album was being received, to be told, in typically abrupt Dutch fashion, "Well - but the album everyone is excited about is this," as he handed me a copy of the yet-to-be-released I Am a Bird Now. My first opportunity to hear it was the next day, on our hopping trip, as I was driven through the streets of suburban Milan. Antony Hegarty's searing voice and the exquisite melancholy of the songs seemed to float up to the apartment buildings I saw out of the corner of the taxi window. It was a singular experience, and one that wedded the first hearing to a landscape and situation from which I can never separate the record. Almost four years later, a journalist friend in Munich tells me that he has an advance copy of the new Antony and the Johnsons album. I travel there to pick it up, and bring it back to the small village in Bavaria where I am temporarily staying. I put on The Crying Light and it is the first day of snow: white-covered pine trees as if dipped in sugar, snow on the fields, the sky a clear-cut blue. Again, Antony's voice, another cycle of songs; but this time a new landscape.