No surprise. In the three years that have passed since the release of Antony and the Johnsons’ Mercury Prize-winning cabaret opus I Am a Bird Now, collaborations have continued to pile up just as handsomely as critical hyperbole did upon its release. Bjork. Devendra Banhart. Nico Muhly. Hercules And Love Affair. While lengthy, the list of names pales when viewed side-by-side with the touring clip Hegarty has kept. While his output may not mirror it, he had hit something of a creative wall. “I was so depleted,” he says. “I just had to stop. I didn’t have anything left to give. I had run out of that kind of energy. I didn’t realize that you could run out of it.”
     It’s difficult to believe. Since returning home from the road in 2007, Hegarty has extended himself well beyond the creative limitations of song, slaking his thirst in the worlds of visual art, film, and fashion design.
     “I love to think about voice as an opportunity to extend beyond one’s local sense of self,” Hegarty muses for a moment. “You can get on a flight to France or use creativity as a magic carpet in a way. I can imagine that the wind is blowing through me or I can imagine that time is blowing through me. I can let my great-grandmother inhabit me in some creative reverie. You can dream outside of the box. That’s what I’ve always loved about the process. There is reverie you can fall into.”