Anyone familiar with the bath-like qualities of Hegarty’s pipes should know full well its ability to transport. I Am a Bird Now was rife with the sort of lonesome mind-gardening befitting his vocal histrionics, but new happenings feel more muscular and taut. Dedicated to and inspired by 102-year-old Japanese dance pioneer (as well as Butoh co-founder) Kazuo Ohno, The Crying Light is, according to Hegarty, a much denser effort than its predecessor.
     While finished mixes weren’t yet ready to be heard at press time, the sonic menu is said to be wildly diverse and, according to Hegarty, “cacophonous” in some corners. If his recent EP Another World is any indicator, those descriptors might hold true. While that EP’s title track is a spare, expectedly heartbreaking piano number, “Shake That Devil” is a jazz-pop knuckleball unlike anything he’s yet laid to tape. But it’s Hegarty’s philosophical and poetic pursuit whose grip should prove most tight. Every ache and pain that sails out from those tired vocal cords are made all the more devastating when coupled with Hegarty’s ruminations on the human experience and his own explorations of self, both sexual and existential. Speaking about the varying psychic topography that came to define this most recent batch of songs, Hegarty speaks of landscapes both outward and within. “It’s this idea [of] stepping into the natural world and opening my eyes in a more childlike way to see it in a different way. Maybe this is the paradise place, a place of light and color, of movement and feeling, a kaleidoscopic evolution, a feminine idea about birth and cycles.” Maybe. But less specifically, his latest work seems to be a vehicle for exploring the earth we eat and walk on:
     “We didn’t realize that we were part of [this world]. We didn’t realize that it was our lifeline or that we were made from it or born from it, that we were just another reflection of it. We are not these spiritual beings from another dimension that are visiting a savage world. We are the children of this place.”