Pitchfork

Photo by Chico De Luigi

The December issue of HARP magazine features an interview with Antony Hegarty about the forthcoming third Antony and the Johnsons album. According to a post today on Antony's website, the album is called The Crying Light, and it'll come out on Secretly Canadian in the spring. Exciting!

In the interview, which can be viewed on Antony's site, he said that "a lot" of the 25 songs he tracked for the record "are just piano songs." He also explained the album is "a little more experimental structurally. But some of [the songs] are really normal... I'm hoping to weave things together so it will be a little more of a collage of songs."

Antony expanded the I Am a Bird Now follow-up's previously reported "ghosts and nature" theme to something a little broader: "It's about landscape and the future. I guess I'm thinking about those things a lot-- about the natural landscape of the world and the landscape inside each person. On my last record, everything was sort of sad and redemptive. And this one, it's more extreme in both directions. Some of the songs are much more joyful, and some of the songs are much less redemptive. And then some of the songs are more thoughtful-- more philosophical. I think this record is just about sitting with things."

HARP reports three of The Crying Light's song titles as "Her Eyes Underneath the Ground", "Give My Name", and "Everglade".

In other Antony news, it turns out he guests on not one but four songs on the forthcoming Hercules and Love Affair album. He also joined Björk in the studio recently to film a music video for their Volta duet "Dull Flame of Desire". And in the December 1 issue of England's The Guardian newspaper, Antony wrote an article appreciating the work of late photographer Peter Hujar, who is the subject of a retrospective currently on view at London's Institute of Contemporary Art. Hujer's photograph "Candy Darling on Her Death Bed" was the image on the cover of I Am a Bird Now.

Thanks to reader Paul Gabrielli for the tip.