NEW YORK TIMES: SOMETIMES you instantly know you have a hit on your hands. And sometimes it takes you a few years to realize it, because you mistakenly assume that your lone collaborator hates the song. In 2004 Andy Butler persuaded his friend Antony, the otherworldly singer of Antony and the Johnsons, to record a dance track he had written called “Blind.”
They listened to it afterward, and Mr. Butler said, “Antony was like: ‘What did we just do? What did I do?’ ” This inscrutable response deterred Mr. Butler from trying to release the song. “Antony always thought it was ‘curious,’ ” he said with a grin. “He thought it was a curious melody. I was like, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ ”
It took Mr. Butler about three years to coax a more definitive opinion from Antony, who, since their lark of a recording session, had won the prestigious Nationwide Mercury Prize in Britain and blossomed into a kind of pansexual global hero. Mr. Butler, on the other hand, had spent the interim making about 25 different versions of “Blind.” MORE