I remember going up to her cabin in Iceland, and meeting her there for the first time,” says Antony, a New York-based musician and artist, of his introduction to Björk. “We had a chat on the side of a hill next to a big goat. She gave us all jumpers. That was our first summit.” They connected immediately, and have since recorded a number of songs together, two of which were released on Björk’s 2007 album, Volta.

Their third collaboration, the graceful and delicate “Flétta,” appears this month on Swanlights, Antony’s fourth album as part of Antony and the Johnsons. Recorded a few years ago, the song came to fruition when Björk, 44, invited Antony, 39, to Jamaica for some much needed downtime. Quite possibly, its creation had something to do with a night of excessive drinking. We’ll let them take it from here.

ANTONY: To be honest, I think Björk had a double intention when she brought me to Jamaica. I was really exhausted because I had just finished my I Am a Bird Now tour. She saw me out on a limb, burnt out, and was like, “Come swim with me in the ocean.” Our working together in the studio was kind of an aside to her harboring me for a bit after that blowout.

BJÖRK: I spontaneously went to Jamaica because I was flipping out in New York. We did “The Dull Flame of Desire” and then I asked you to replace one of my vocals on “My Juvenile” [both of which appear on Volta] so that it would sound like another character in the song rather than me having a conversation with myself—as usual. Volta had a very trumpets-on-top-of-a-mountain, justice-demanding sound to it. I really loved “Flétta,” the song that’s coming out now, but it didn’t have that emotional stance. It was more fragile and playful. We’d been singing all day and I just kind of improvised the vocals in one go, in Icelandic gibberish, and then I went to bed. I was exhausted, or was I drunk? I can’t remember. Antony sneaked into the studio and he very carefully put all these layered backing vocals on top of my gibberish. The next morning, he said, “Do you want to come hear something?” I sat down and was totally blown away. It was really unplanned and probably could have only happened in Jamaica.

BLACKBOOK: Is this organic style characteristic of your approach to making music?

A: Working with Björk was unique because it was through music that we got to know each other. In some ways, we were very polite with each other, weren’t we? We wanted to leave enough space for each of us to be present and see what that space contained. This song was one of those encounters. It’s almost like a sonic diary entry about the beginning of our friendship.

Björk, you split your time between New York and Reykjavik, two places that couldn’t be more different.

B: I wear mountain boots in Iceland and heels in New York! I’m going to bring my mountain boots to New York and see how that goes.

Or maybe you should bring your heels to Iceland?

B: It took me 10 years to realize I’d separated my two lives into different types of footwear, but I’m going to try to mix them up more.

How do you deal with the tension between being an artist and being a celebrity?

B: You just have to take it as it comes. Dirty years ago, public perception was that all celebrities were the same, that they’re all just one brand. They were perceived as being obsessed with attention, always wanting their photograph taken. But I think that the internet, reality TV shows, and Paris Hilton have helped to change this perception. Now people understand that there are several very different species of celebrity. When I was in London, I was an A-list celebrity with 40 photographers in my garden each day, and so I just moved away. I went somewhere else where I became C-list or D-list, or F-list, even.

Antony, what inspired the creation of this new album?

A: This is something that Björk and I have had quite a few conversations about—our relationship as artists to our environment, in the present, but also grappling with what the future might hold.

B: I come from a country with 300,000 people and we’re at a major crossroads right now. People are trying to decide if Iceland will join the EU, and if they’ll privatize access to Iceland’s energy sources. They’re both really huge questions. Usually, if I’m not involved with music, I feel like I’m wasting my time, but now I’m standing up and saying, Listen, you ruined the banks. You can’t just stick your messy fingers in nature. Right now we have an online petition in which we’re asking the government for a national referendum on how to deal with access to our energy sources. As we speak, I think about 10 percent of the islanders have signed, and we only need 15 percent. So that’s the stuff I’ve been sticking my messy fingers into.

A: Your life has become full with this, especially in the past year.

B: I now realize that if I was to sit down and say, Okay, I’m just going to write music and you guys can sort this shit out, that in the two years it might take me to make an album, all the rights to Iceland’s energy sources will have been sold to international companies that have committed humanitarian and environmental crimes.

Antony, are you similarly involved in this type of activism?

A: I’m always wrestling with my sense of responsibility to the unfolding story that we’re telling right now as a society, and as a civilization, in relation to the environment, biodiversity, and our ecosystem. Björk is talking about different kinds of practical activism, but this new work is much more internal. It’s more about my psychic path through this evolution of awareness, and my attempts to evolve, change, respond to, or grieve in the face of where I perceive we are. I don’t even think of environmentalism as a political issue anymore. It’s one of survival.

B: I remember when I went to England when I was 16 and I met all these punks. They were all vegetarians, and I knew if I lived in England I would be a vegetarian, too, because of all those factory farms. In Iceland, though, the sheep still walk wild in the mountains, and I still eat lamb. Each situation is different. What’s been most difficult for me is stepping out of my poetic comfort zone. When you’ve done music for so long, the fact that most things you do are in harmony with the poetic stance of your work spoils you. I have to admit that part of me is a bit of a snob. I think that politics are hideous and vulgar. For me to confront some of these people, I’ve had to use a certain language that I find really vulgar. But I wouldn’t get any results if I kept being esoteric. In the long run, I respect the statements on Antony’s album 500,000 times more than some silly article in the newspaper. I think his is a more valuable weapon.

A: When I talk about the spirit world on my album, it’s very much tied into the way I perceive the environment and the state that it’s in, and the trajectory that we’re on in our relationship to it. It’s not some pastoral, romantic vision of the environment. The manifest world is to me the spirit world. I was raised in a Catholic house where I was taught that only human beings have souls and that nature is supplied to meet our needs throughout our lives, until we go all off to some paradise, which has been prescribed by these male religious models. Over the past 10 years—and this ties in with my own sense of identity as a trans-gender person—I’ve moved toward more feminine models. I don’t mean feminine in any kind of floral way, but rather an intensely powerful, creative way.

Does either of you feel any sense of obligation to address environmental issues?

B: Whether I like it or not, I have a pedestal. I have access to the media, which a lot of people don’t, and I am listened to, so, yes, I’ve made a decision to use that pedestal.

A: I’m not sure how effective I am, or could ever really be, in the political arena. But I do think as an artist, especially as an artist with any kind of a platform, that I mirror the greater consciousness of the community of people who listen to my work. I can’t separate these issues, which are so primary to me in my own value system, from my creative process.

B: Iceland, in a way, is like America about 200 years ago. The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in Iceland. We were a colony and because of that we were treated like shit, which was terrible, but the upside is that our country wasn’t industrialized. Now we are confronted with the question, “Are we going to become New Jersey?” The battle in Iceland is that we still don’t have to go there. We could go straight to 21st century green solutions.

A: Except that this is a global issue. There are basic moral questions that reach far beyond local or even national politics at this point. It’s about a more profound evolution than anyone’s yet willing to imagine.

B: I still think there’s hope. It’s like when they invented the nuclear bomb, or fire: “What do you do with it? Do you destroy things, or do you do something good?” And it took a huge change in the world to decide that nuclear bombs maybe weren’t such a good idea, an issue we’re still dealing with. I feel the same way about our relationship with the environment: We can change it. I’m not saying things are going to get fixed right away, and that we’re all going to have a smashing happy ending, but I think we’re in the process of learning how to make technology communicate with nature, feminine communicate with masculine, the spiritual unite with the scientific. These two sides have been separated for 200 years, and they can be combined again.

A: And this is why I’m friends with Björk, because she tells me things like that and then I put down the phone and think, Okay, I can get through three more days.