I bought the album “Dark Was the Night” on the recommendation of some music blog or other. I’ve liked lots of the “Red Hot…” albums and this one was along the same lines. Various artists and working to benefit AIDS research. There were many artists on the album that I really like: Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, Iron and Wine, Feist, etc. So, I bit. And I was listening to it and this haunting song came on. I was sure it was Nina Simone. It sounded like a song that I had heard as a child, some rendition of a traditional song reborn as protest song. I was born in Jackson, Mississippi to some hip, modern parents, part of a wave of conscious white folks moving to the South, and they certainly would have been on to some New Folk like this.
So, it was haunting for that reason. In addition, the singer’s voice is muted and choked and wavering. It’s the kind of song that actually would stop you in your tracks. It’s soft enough that you can’t rustle while listening to it. And it ain’t Nina Simone, it’s some British dude named Antony Hegarty. I guess it makes some kind of sense that he sounds like Nina Simone, as he identifies as transgendered and gay, so there’s an aspect of a drag queen in the voice, and Nina Simone has that kind of torch singer to her.
The voice sings about the despair of having left home, broken ties with family, and now having to learn that a parent has died with nothing resolved and nothing in order in the relationship. And his voice (and now his backstory) add depth to the story. Was he chased out of the family for his sexuality? Is he going to return triumphant for the funeral, out and proud, the prodigal son returned? (It doesn’t seem so.) But overall, the song gets me because of the central idea of leaving people that we can’t return to. It’s an idea that’s always gotten to me, right to the core. Maybe it’s because I’ve moved so much throughout my life, maybe it’s something else. I tried to explain it once to an old girlfriend, and I couldn’t get the idea of the longing loneliness of someone essentially ceasing to exist in the world for you, even someone who was essential and close to you, due to purpose, chance; it seems strange that importance can be that ethereal.
There is a reason for this song on the album, too. It’s an album for AIDS research, and so why not have a song by a gay man about being exiled from his family? It certainly seems topical and relevant and horrible. But the song itself is beautiful. I don’t know if I could handle a whole album in this style and so I haven’t gotten any other Antony and the Johnsons’ albums, but I will be checking him out more and seeing what the story is.
