You can hear Antony and the Johnsons at Slate. Here's what they say about "I Am a Bird Now":
"Hope There's Someone," the opening track on the second album by Antony and the Johnsons, begins with a startling sound: A singer's voice, trembling with vibrato, climbs over some plaintive piano chords into an eerie falsetto. The singer is Antony, a pudgy New Yorker with shaved eyebrows and a songwriting gift to match his remarkable voice. On I Am a Bird Now, Antony has gathered several arty downtown friends (including Rufus Wainwright and Lou Reed) and created 10 songs of disarming intimacy; it's a shock to hear pop music that strives for beauty and pathos without resorting to a single distancing wink. "For Today I Am a Boy" is a portrait of the drag queen as a young man that builds to a magnificent gospel-like crescendo of rolling piano chords; "Hope There's Someone" proves that the right singer can make banalities ("Hope there's someone who'll take care of me/ When I die") sound profound.
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Striving "for beauty and pathos without resorting to a single distancind wink" is at the heart of the Advanced Theory.
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