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t’s Elvis Perkins’s birthday. February 9. to Los Angeles. Then 9/11 happened. Understandably, it took him some years “This is a funny place,” he says over the phone from the city where he to attempt to come to terms with his mother’s murder and the overall pall of was raised. “Los Angeles essentially exists to support the make-believe.” the events of that day. This procedure culminated in his self-released 2006 deYet for all the make-believe going on in Hollywood, the wrenchingly surreal but, AshWednesday (reissued in 2007 by XL Recordings), although, despite how life of the now 40-year-old singer-songwriter has been one that even the most the press has presented it, Perkins stresses that not all of the album’s songs are imaginative screenwriter wouldn’t fathom. A life that can be heard, felt, and about the loss of his mother. “It’s essentially just a collection of songs, arranged glimpsed in his dreamlike, highly literate music. Perkins’s third and newest al- chronologically,” he says. “About half of them were written before she died and bum, I Aubade (MIR Records), is the perfect portal into this weird, wistful world. about half were written after. Of course, the post-9/11 songs are more than (To his credit, its maker eschews the term “singer-songwriter,” which dredges slightly darker. But there are love songs, joke songs. Songs I’m not sure what up images of “open mike nights and coffee shops and lazy chord structures.” He they are. The title track is equally about the day after 9/11 and the fumigation prefers, simply, “recording artist.”) I Aubade’s softly strummed, acoustic-based of our family’s home.” songs have a sad-happy cast. They shimmer like afternoon sunlight as it dapples Ash Wednesday won instant acclaim for its sparse, brooding folk pathos upon through trees, bringing back the half-napping release, by which time Perkins was back at car-seat warmth of family drives on visits to Brown. “I wanted to get out of LA and I sensed Elvis Perkins is the son relatives in the country. Its tracks—“& Eveline,” that I’d be touring because of the attention the of actor Anthony Perkins, record was getting,” says Perkins. “So I re-en“I Came for Fire,” “Gasolina”—flicker, crackle, and float with Perkins’s distant coo swaddled in rolled, basically as a way to get back to Proviwho died in 1992 of oscillating radio waves and other found sounds. dence and form a band with some guys I’d been AIDS-related pneumonia, playing with there.” The band, although cheekily Think Leonard Cohen meets Syd Barrett in a vat of Vick’s VapoRub. named Elvis Perkins in Dearland, was further and photographer Berry There’s no easy or delicate way to broach this: comprised of multi-instrumentalists Brigham Perkins is the son of actor Anthony Perkins, who Berenson, who perished as Brough, Nick Kinsey, and Wyndham Boylandied in 1992 of AIDS-related pneumonia, and Garnett, and had a shared dynamic the leader a passenger on American had missed during his time as an unaccompaphotographer Berry Berenson, who perished as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 when Airlines Flight 11 on 9/11. nied solo performer. Elvis Perkins in Dearland terrorists crashed it into the World Trade Centoured in support of Ash Wednesday, recorded an ter’s north tower on September 11, 2001. Unsurprisingly, those events have eponymously titled follow-up for XL in 2008, and did more roadwork in North dramatically colored the singer’s life and his music. But they’re far from the America and Europe. only events that have done so. Born in New York, he and his older brother OsThe rootless Perkins got to know the Hudson Valley while staying at Kinsey’s good (a drummer, actor, and, coincidentally, a screenwriter), moved with their family’s home in the Dutchess County hamlet of Stanfordville between tours. family to Los Angeles when Elvis was four. “I remember the confusion of being “Wyndham’s also from the area, so with both of those guys having graduated I in a new house, the relative spaciousness and the smell of the magnolia trees,” wasn’t gonna go back to Providence,” he says. “This neck of the woods began he says. “In LA, I just became a kid and I grew up. But I’ve always had a compli- to feel like home.” He made one more release for XL, the 2009 EP Doomsday, cated relationship with [the city].” His father, who also played piano and made and rented a place in Germantown. There, he settled in to begin work on the pop records before his defining role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s batch of intimate, self-recorded songs that comprise I Aubade (its title a pun on 1960 film Psycho, was a huge Elvis Presley fan, although Perkins maintains it the word aubade, meaning a morning poem or song, and the phrase “I obeyed”) was his mother’s idea to name him after the rock ’n’ roll king. “At first they and harken back to four-track experiments he’d done in his early 20s, long weren’t intending to name me Elvis—it was a joke that got out of hand,” says before Ash Wednesday. Sojourns took him back to Los Angeles and other spots the singer, who, admittedly, once rebelled against his moniker. “Eight out of ev- to record with friends and collect some of the incidental sounds mixed into the ery 10 times I introduce myself to someone there’s a reaction of disbelief. For songs on the new album (the mysterious radio waves on “AM” were picked up a while, when I lived in Santa Fe, I went by my middle name, which is Brooke. in a mobile home in Ojai, California). But the bulk of I Aubade was cut in GerBut that’s a girl’s name, so it wasn’t any better. And to my friends I was always mantown and at his current apartment in Hudson, where he taped the sounds Elvis, anyway. So I guess it just means I’m probably doing what I’m supposed of fireworks and thunder by sticking a microphone out the window. to be doing. If I’d been named John, who knows what would have happened.” “Elvis definitely has an individual approach,” says Kinsey, who contributes Perkins started doing what he does at a young age, taking piano and saxo- percussion to the disc. “Even now, after playing with him for 10 years, his songs phone lessons before studying guitar with Prescott Niles, the bassist of power- still reveal new things to me.” pop greats the Knack. Although his parents had an excellent record collection, At the time of the interview for this writing, Perkins was in Los Angeles especially when it came to musicals, the sounds that first grabbed him were a to work on the soundtrack of February, his brother’s second film as a director, bit less intellectual. And they came with visuals. “I grew up in the heyday of and to perform at a benefit concert for Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, the West MTV, so I watched music more than I listened to it in the beginning,” he recalls. Coast-based charity organization that assists uninsured musicians with medical “It’s a funny way to get music. So I was a big fan of appearance then. I was defi- costs. Speaking to the Guardian in 2007, he remarked, “I’d never call myself nitely the intended audience for hair metal.” He and his brother formed some happy or sad.” But, having heard his recordings, which are indeed sometimes basement bands with high school friends, although at that point he was simply sad, and having seen his performances, which are often euphoric and uplifting, a guitarist and not yet a songwriter. Still, playing music was a helpful outlet for it’s tempting to say he’s both. both the typical growing pains of teendom and the processing of his father’s “Well, we all have an equal potential to express a range of emotions,” he passing. “Because of my dad’s work, my brother and I weren’t really supposed offers. “But I’m definitely not inclined to be a downer when I’m in the position to talk about him being sick,” Perkins says. His initial songwriting inspirations of entertaining people.” were Tracy Chapman, Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and the Traveling After all he’s been through with the tragic loss of his parents, wouldn’t it be Wilburys, the last a door into Dylan and the Beatles. “The first time I heard easy to be bitter? Simon and Garfunkel was when I was riding in the car with my parents,” he “It would seem a terrible waste to be bitter,” he says, after pondering a bit. remembers. “The parts in their songs had a special force and were powerful “My parents were amazing people, and I feel very lucky to have arrived on while doing very little musically.” Earth literally through them. To be bitter would be a path that wouldn’t honor He attended Brown University, taking “random” courses in ethnomusicolo- them, or my own life. Or the mystery looming behind it all.” gy and philosophy and playing in the school’s gamelan ensemble. Dropping out after a year, he started writing songs in earnest and performing, and returned I Aubade is out now on MIR Records. Elvisperkinssound.net. 3/16 CHRONOGRAM MUSIC 57