Anohni (Antony Hegarty) part 1

Today I proudly present an artist who's a favorite of mine among the recent ones. She used to be known as Antony Hegarty and now she goes by the name of Anohni.

Anohni is transgender and uses she/her pronouns. In an interview with Flavorwire in November 2014 she stated, "My closest friends and family use feminine pronouns for me. I have not mandated the press do one thing or another... In my personal life I prefer ‘she’. I think words are important. To call a person by their chosen gender is to honor their spirit, their life and contribution. ‘He’ is an invisible pronoun for me, it negates me."

Anohni was born in Chichester, England in 1971. Her family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States in 1981. In 1990, she moved to Manhattan to study at New York University, where she founded the performance art collective Blacklips with Johanna Constantine.

Entering a musical career, she began performing with an ensemble of NYC musicians as Antony and the Johnsons. Their first album, Antony and the Johnsons, was released in 2000. This album included a monumental song called Cripple and the Starfish. The lyrics center around the narrator's willingness to accept, and even encourage, abuse from a romantic interest. The chorus says, in part, "It's true I always wanted love to be full of pain...I am so very, very happy, so come on and hurt me I am so very, very happy, so please hit me..." One critic wrote that Cripple and the Starfish is an example of how Hegarty informs "emotions with their opposites" and cited the lyrics "I always wanted love to be / filled with pain and bruises" as a way in which the writer-singer "transforms his songs into deliciously painful pleasures."

A reviewer for The Guardian called this song "a majestic and poignant anthem about the unhelpful blindness of love in an abusive relationship" and said "It's about having your fingers cut off and them growing again, like a starfish. It's about coming back for more." Another critic deemed it "a redemptive love song", with "Antony creating a metaphor for the pain of love with the repeated lyric 'I grow back like a starfish.'" Lou Reed, whose collaborations with Antony and the Johnsons helped bolster the group's success, said of Hegarty, "When I first heard Cripple and the Starfish‚ I knew I was in the presence of an angel."

It's an exquisite song. Here it is:

From the same album, Hitler In My Heart also tells the tale of a twisted, tortured love.

In 2001, Anohni released a follow-up EP called I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy. The title song is another masterwork, the kind of song that you need to hear with your eyes closed.

In 2002 Anohni collaborated with Jamie Saft in the latter's album, specifically on the song Blood on the Door.

All these songs I have learned and loved a few years after they were released. My first personal contact with Anohni 's voice was from a song in Lou Reed's The Raven, a CD that I purchased the moment it came out in 2003. In that, Anohni collaborated with Lou in a reworking of one of Reed's classics, Perfect Day. Here's the video from a recording session in 2002:

They worked together again a year later in a new version of another Reed classic, Candy Says:

Two collaborations from 2004: first, here's Anohni's collaboration with Brooks in A Little Bit of Time:

We heard this when we did Rufus Wainwright, but let's hear it once more. Their collaboration is called Old Whore's Diet. Here's the video:

Now, two collaborations from 2005: first, Beautiful Boyz which was recorded for the Noah's Ark soundtrack, together with CocoRosie:

A very interesting choice of recording partner (Boy George) and of song (John Lennon's Xmas classic Happy Xmas: War Is Over) resulted to this:

The world was ready to embrace Antony and the Johnsons when I Am a Bird Now, their 2nd album proper, came out in mid 2005. The album had stellar reviews (88 out of 100, on the review aggregate site Metacritic, indicating universal acclaim).

The album has appeared on several end of year lists. Mojo named I Am a Bird Now the best album of 2005. Pitchfork Media ranked the album #5 on its list of the top 50 albums of 2005. On the same website, the track "Hope There's Someone" was ranked #28 on their list of the Top 500 Songs of the 2000s and was selected as 2005's best single. The album also won the Mercury Prize on September 2005. After winning the prize, it shot up the UK Albums chart from #135 to #16 in one week, the biggest jump in the history of the Mercury Music Prize. As of Fall 2011, UK sales stand at 220 000 copies. It was also a hit in many European countries.

Hope There's Someone was the opening track of the album - and what a track it was! Just beautiful. It was also the album's first single (UK #44). Here's the video:

The 2nd track, My Lady Story, was another beautiful song. Here it is, performed live in 2006 in the UK.

The 3d track, For Today I Am a Boy, is probably my favorite song of this album. I think it's one of the definitive songs concerning the trans experience.

The 2nd single from this album, You Are My Sister, did slightly better than the first  (UK #39). Here's the video:

In Fistful of Love, Lou Reed graciously repays Anohni by making a guest appearance.

Of the many collaborations Anohni had in 2006, I picked out two: first, here's Leonard Cohen's If It Be Your Will, from a tribute to Cohen:

Then, here's Lowlands Low, sung in a duet with Bryan Ferry:

Two collaborations from 2007: firstly, here's Anohni's collaboration with Björk in The Dull Flame Of Desire:

We've listened to the duet in The Ballad Of Sad Young Men when we did Marc Almond. One more time certainly won't hurt:

She really worked with the best, didn't she? here's her 2008 collaboration with Marianne Faithfull called Ooh Baby Baby:

There just has to be a part 2. Tomorrow we'll start with the release of the Antony and the Johnsons' 2009 album called The Crying Light. Hope to see you then.