J. Ralph confesses to having a major cultural flashback experience while working with the stellar musical lineup he assembled to record songs for a new documentary about autism, “Wretches and Jabberers: And Stories From the Road.”

The remarkably diverse list of participants includes Norah Jones, Scarlett Johansson, Carly Simon, Devendra Banhart, Antony Hegarty, Ben Harper, Vashti Bunyan, Bob Weir, Stephen Stills and Vincent Gallo among many more.

They all signed on to be part of producer-director Gerardine Wurzburg’s film centering on a road trip undertaken by two autistic adult men.

[For the record, Oct. 25, 10:52 a.m.:  An earlier version of this post misspelled producer-director Gerardine Wurzburg's name as Wurzberg.]

“It was the craziest thing,” said Ralph, the New York singer and songwriter who composed scores for two previous Academy Award-winning documentaries, James Marsh’s “Man on Wire” in 2008 and Louis Psihoyos “The Cove” from last year. Ralph’s work on those projects prompted Wurzberg to seek him out to supply music for her exploration of the isolation and alienation that often accompanies autism.

In the 144-page book of his collages and paintings that Antony Hegarty put out as a companion to “Swanlights,” there’s an illustration of a bloodied polar bear. The accompanying text tells how the bear was shot in the heart but then ran across the ice for 200 yards before collapsing to his death. The startling image clearly connected with the vanguard artist-musician, who also put the creature on the album’s cover.

With a voice that embodies both life’s fragility and something as towering as that great white bear, Hegarty has carved his own luminous path. He communes with the sacred and majestic in life, often against a backdrop of pain and suffering, and with the natural world as his most charged landscape. On the twinkling “Swanlights,” the fourth studio album he’s made with his classically attuned band, working in a more stylistically abundant form here than last year’s “The Crying Light,” he captures the otherworldly more often than not. Occasionally, though, the songs overreach or miss some central point.

In the best moments on “Swanlights,” the sacred and the suffering are merely different shades of the same verdant world. On “Everything Is New,” a standard in his live shows, Hegarty -- sometimes sounding brave, sometimes frightened -- encapsulates the violence and wonder of birth or rebirth. The racing piano and clustered strings (arranged by acclaimed young composer Nico Muhly and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra) of “Ghost” sets up a rewarding urgency that folds in on itself as much as it advances. The rapturous “Flétta,” his Icelandic duet with kindred swan Bjork, is a suspension bridge between contemplation and joviality.

On “Salt Silver Oxygen,” Hegarty offers fascinating concepts (“dancing with his casket, Christ becomes a wife”) but the song’s glittering bluster never quite unlocks. “Thank You for Your Love” is much more direct but it pushes close to easy sentimentality with its oft-repeated title, albeit embedded in some first-rate, Stax-style soul. Not to discourage Hegarty from expressing a little unfettered joy, of course, but so few have his gift for evoking many shades of emotion. When he’s working in one mode, the listener can’t help but miss all that could’ve been.

--Margaret Wappler

Antony and the Johnsons
“Swanlights”
Secretly Canadian
Three stars

It's true that the screen for this YouTube "video" is black -- as in no images, no words, just black. The most obvious reason for the blackness is that this is a leak, not a video, from Antony Hegarty's upcoming album, "Swanlights," but it also works nicely for this duet between Hegarty and one of his heroes, the Nordic glacial bird Bjork.

"Flétta" has so much emotional range packed into its four-plus minutes that you need a solid base to return to, for calm, for relief, for an elegantly nil counterpoint. Maybe that's a lot to read into an image-less YouTube upload, but try listening to these two and see if you don't experience a rush of what psychiatrists have called "feelings."

Here they are, Antony and Bjork, stranded on a landscape where Antony's piano forges the only footpath out. The two of them intertwine lines, Bjork rolling her r's like fussy royalty, Hegarty coiling around her voice with his own tremulous but certain quaver. At the middle point, the piano becomes more assertive and choppy but it returns to the opening pensive point again. For the rest of the song, those sides trade off, each becoming more potent until it bows out at the end with no sense of resolution, only a sense that a conversation like this is continuous, timeless.

"Swanlights" drops Oct. 12 from Secretly Canadian, a perfect entree to autumn.

Oh yeah, there's another version of this leak circulating with some slow-motion video of great whites and other big sea creatures swimming around. But it's not nearly as good, imho.

-- Margaret Wappler

Nature versus nurture: The eternal dichotomy haunts Antony Hegarty, the milky-voiced star of post-millennial art song. His transgendered image and aggressively beautiful music force a confrontation with the very idea of the natural. On "The Crying Light," the follow-up to the internationally acclaimed 2005 release "I Am a Bird Now," Antony and his chamber ensemble take the organic world as a subject, decrying humanity's violence against the goddess Gaia while celebrating the bond between the wordless, magical Earth and its many strange mutations -- especially the artist himself.

From the opening track, which suggests one of William Blake's poems reinterpreted by a coloratura Snow White, through songs that challenge fears of disease ("Epilepsy Is Dancing"), birth, death, erotic ecstasy and even the apocalypse (the stately lament "Another World," also the title track of a 2008 EP), Antony follows in the Romantic tradition of celebrating nature as a psychic salve. The songs, set in tastefully fecund arrangements by composer Nico Muhly, relate the singer's evolving consciousness to the planet's life cycle.

It's the most personal environmentalist statement possible, making an unforeseen connection between queer culture's identity politics and the green movement. As music, it's simply exquisite -- more controlled and considered than anything Antony and the Johnsons have done and sure to linger in the minds of listeners for more than a season.

--Ann Powers

Antony and the Johnsons 
"The Crying Light"
Secretly Canadian
**** (Four stars)