Singer-songwriter Antony Hegarty has just released The Crying Light, the third album by his band Antony and the Johnsons. (Don Felix Cervantes/Secretly Canadian)

Trying to craft a description of Antony Hegarty is a bit like trying to keep a firm grasp on a bar of soap. A slippery character known primarily as the milky-voiced diva behind the operatic pop ensembleAntony and the Johnsons, Hegarty delights in straddling boundaries.

Transgender children 'are a blessing to their family. They bring clarity, they see lights and colour more brightly, and while other children throw footballs, they’re off dancing in a dazzle by themselves.'

—Antony Hegarty

His formidable physical presence — he’s over six feet tall, solid but with soft edges — is at odds with his voice, an ululating tenor that evokes Nina Simone, Alison Moyet and whale song. He creates baroque, arty music with classical virtuosos, but also adores the music of Beyonce (he’s been known to cover Crazy in Love in concert). He is a gay man who’s unequivocally feminine without being fey. And though he’s unabashedly emotional, Hegarty never seems fragile — rather, the sincerity and openness that come through in his music convey a profound strength.

A drama queen with a background in campy performance art, Hegarty has become an international pop darling. In 2005, Antony and the Johnsons won the prestigious British Mercury Prize for their album I Am a Bird Now, a heartbreaking collection of songs that addressed such topics as gender confusion and sadomasochistic romance. Even the Mercury Prize win became a quibble over identity politics. Though Hegarty was born in Sussex, England, he moved to California at age 10 and has lived in the U.S. ever since. Some naysayers felt the singer and his band weren’t quite British enough to qualify for a U.K. honour. Regardless of citizenship, Hegarty’s finely wrought ballads were worthy of Mercury acclaim, though high-profile guest stars like Boy George and Lou Reed helped bring the group wider exposure.

Hegarty made a detour into disco last year, lending his inimitable vocals to the lauded dance music project Hercules and Love Affair, whose self-titled album landed on many Best of 2008 lists and introduced the singer to a new demographic.

Some of his core fans might have feared that Hercules and Love Affair signalled a new direction for Antony and the Johnsons. Their new album, The Crying Light, should put those concerns to rest. The Crying Light is a collection of ethereal ballads that foreground Hegarty’s quivering voice. There are fewer big-name cameos, though contemporary classical wunderkind Nico Muhly contributes haunting string arrangements. The initial spark for the album, Hegarty claims, was the early work of British singer Kate Bush.

The cover of The Crying Light, the new album by Antony and the Johnsons. (Secretly Canadian)

“She’s probably a huge role model for me,” Hegarty muses in a recent phone interview. “The Kick Inside was the first album I ever bought, and I’ve been listening to it for 30 years. The great thing about buying a record when you were seven is that you memorize the lyrics phonetically, because you don’t know what the artist is talking about. You invent a magic language around it, and Kate Bush is like your magic big sister, dancing through the mountains. Later on, you realize she’s actually singing outrageous poems about Greek mythology.”

Hegarty’s keening wail on The Crying Light’s title track calls to mind Bush’s track Oh England My Lionheart, while the giddy, hiccupping melodies of her song Army Dreamers are echoed in the airy vocals, piano and strings of Hegarty’s Epilepsy Is Dancing. Hegarty was also fascinated by the “strange magical pagan” imagery that’s a recurring motif in Bush’s work. The themes of alienation and mortality that appeared on I Am a Bird Now show up on The Crying Light as well. But this time, Hegarty uses them to explore his relationship to the natural world.

“[Bush]’s a feminist, spiritualist genius,” he raves, “and I love the way nature is so integrated into her vision, that she has a sense of interconnectedness with the natural world. It’s very English, in a way — my mom has that, too. They have church in England and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day there is something very pagan about an English garden, with the countryside and riding horses through the thickets. I feel like the landscape hasn’t been blasted with fundamentalism the way it has [in North America]. It’s still inhabited by spirits.”

Though Hegarty was raised Catholic, his brand of spirituality has little to do with organized religion; his epiphanies are more about the sublime, about transcendental beauty. He says it’s connected to his experience of being transgendered. Though Hegarty occupies the male body he was born with, he’s open about his complex gender identity, which he’s expressed in songs like My Lady Story and the heartbreaking For Today I Am a Boy. He doesn’t yearn to be female per se, but feels comfortable existing in a fluid space between masculinity and femininity. For Hegarty, transgenderism is a “spiritual condition.”

He insists that trans issues are not only relevant to adults. He frequently shares his poetic and lovely belief that one can measure the psychic and spiritual health of a culture by the way it treats transgender kids.

Antony and the Johnsons in performance. (Leah Nash/Secretly Canadian)

“It’s a condition of the centre of their soul,” he states. “It’s sacred, and those children are a blessing to their family. They bring clarity, they see lights and colour more brightly, and while other children throw footballs, they’re off dancing in a dazzle by themselves. They’re usually the tenderest and most sensitive children, and they bring a unique perspective that comes from being born a spiritual outsider.”

Hegarty is well aware that his newfound fame affords him a privileged platform — and a responsibility — to be a vocal role model for other gender-variant individuals. He sees his success, particularly in North America, as a mark of cultural progress, and feels that the “internet generation” has been responsible for the “refreshing of America’s awareness of itself.”

“I look at how the more conservative members of my family have become more liberal and permissive. It must be because they’ve been exposed to far more things that were once taboo. It’s way harder for people to pretend [non-homogenized things] don’t exist when those things are basically happening in their beds.”

The Crying Light is in stores now. Antony and the Johnsons play Toronto on Feb. 17 and Vancouver on Feb. 27.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.