Antony Hegarty:

“They’re actually entwined, those two ideas – being born into the transgender community, my experience of being in my body has been quite alienated. I felt I was stuck inside this thing. I have been searching my whole life for a place where I belonged, and ‘Everglade’ is about my realisation that I do belong. I am at home. I am a part of the sunlight and the water and the trees. My body stopped crying for home, I stopped feeling alienated. I stopped having such cruel thoughts in my head, that I was alone and would always be alone. [from an interview in Plan B Mag. Dec. 2008]

“A few years ago I was lying in a canoe at a friend’s house in upstate New York, flat out on the water, and looking up at the trees above me, and suddenly was struck by imagining that each of the leaves was an eye. ‘Everglade’ is addressing that alienation, seeking to re-connect with that perpetually watching world.”
[from an interview in Plan B Mag. Dec. 2008]

Everglade [video] – Studio version

Lyrics:

When I’m floating in the water
And your eyes are lilies all around
When I’m lying sweetly in my bed
The sun plays crystal with my eyes

Then I stop
My body stops crying for home
My limbs stop weeping for home

When I’m peeping in a parlour of trees
And the leaves are winking all around
I’m home, my heart sobs in my veins
But brains they play the softest games

Fingers kiss the string
Mouth taste the blade
Of everglade (x3)

Antony and the Johnsons – Everglade – [Live] Laiterie Strasbourg – April 2009
Live Version

“I wanted to make a marker in time, marking the incredible loss we’re all feeling as we deplete the world, the only world we know, the only world we will ever know. Heaven is not elsewhere; this is all we have. We’re at such a critical point with it, not only in the physical sense but also on a threshold of feeling. This has preoccupied me throughout my adult life, and it has reached critical mass in terms of my wanting to take it as a clear theme for this group of work, at this particular point in time. I set myself a task to be really clear about it, to write and talk unmediatedly, to set down a marker in time to show directly how I’m feeling, and that’s what Another World is.”

“My favorite song is “Everglade”, just because it feels like the most recent song I wrote, and it really describes how I feel today. It’s a song about me peering out and looking at the leaves, and the leaves have eyes in them, and they are looking back at me. Everything is more alive than ever and yet, I’m sitting with a very beautiful world, but I’m still aware of a brokenness in me. And it’s about sitting with these two things at the same time — brokenness and a beautiful world.” [from an interview in The Tripwire Feb. 2009]

**full interview from Tripwire: here
** full interview from Plan B mag over at bunnyrabble

cross-posted at: women in love