|
Official
Website
Listen!
Tour Dates
Download Hi Res Images:
photos
by Sam Erickson
|
 |
Elvis
Perkins
|
Elvis
Perkins’ debut album, Ash Wednesday, feels
both lived in and lived through. He combines emotional
intimacy with a warm-hearted studio sound that recalls
Nick Drake and Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison. Perkins
deliberately circumvented the digital route, making demos
at home before gathering a small group of fellow players
and friends to cut these tracks to analog tape in a Burbank
studio and at a Victorian house in L.A. They helped Perkins
flesh out material in which he transforms the at-times
extraordinary circumstances of his personal life into
compelling, dream-like songs with lyrics that teeter between
the specific and the surreal.
.
For the last year and a half, Perkins has been doing club
dates around the country to increasing acclaim; touring
with such acts as Okkervil River, Dr. Dog, Matt Costa
and the Pernice Brothers; appearing at events like Seattle’s
Sasquatch! Festival, Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits;
and performing on radio stations like Seattle, Washington’s
influential KEXP and L.A.’s KXLU. As Perkins became
more visible with his three-piece band – bassist
Brigham Brough, keyboardist/guitarist Wyndham Boylan-Garnett,
and drummer Nicholas Kinsey, known collectively as Elvis
Perkins in Dearland – his reputation has grown, along
with the size of his audience. The enthusiasm of online
bloggers helped After seeing him at the Rockwood Music
Hall on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the folks at
Stereogum declared, “We were sold on the spot –
fuss-worthy folkies just don’t come easy...Double
bass, harmonica and strings color these lyrical laments,
but the man’s easy melodicism is the real charm.
Dearland is very much a family affair. Wyndham is one
of Perkins’ oldest friends – in fact they are
godbrothers. While he doesn’t play on Ash Wednesday,
he was present at the sessions; Nick and Brigham did contribute
performances. The live quartet continually experiments
with Perkins’ repertoire, tinkering with the arrangements,
playing around with tempos and varying the instrumentation.
Among the tools of their trade are marching drum, harmonium,
trombone, organ, piano and all sort of literal bells and
whistles.
Perkins cut Ash Wednesday with his actor-musician
brother Osgood on drums and friend Ethan Gold arranging
and producing. Like Perkins’ show, the recording
was very spontaneous in approach, and much of the album,
including the vocals, consists of live takes. Veteran
drummer Gary Mallaber, who appeared on Van Morrison’s
Moondance, was enlisted to guest on a few tracks and got
right into the spirit of things: he heard “While
You Were Sleeping” for the first time as he performed
on it. Astral Weeks was a touchstone, in terms of feel
and sound, with its evocative mix of folk, rock and jazz
and its naturalistic flow of words. “We wanted to
make a human-sounding document,” Perkins says of
their decision to record in analog. Ash Wednesday conjures
a powerful mood, with horn arrangements reminiscent of
the brass bands that play both mournfully and joyfully
at New Orleans funerals and snatches of elegant, understated
strings (which Gold was often dreaming up arrangements
for right on the spot). Perkins divides the album into
two distinct “sides,” with the title track as
the metaphorical side-two starter.
Perkins has indeed been known as Elvis since birth; it’s
not a moniker he pointedly adopted a la Mr. Costello.
His father was the late actor Anthony Perkins; his mother
Berry Berenson, an actress and noted photographer, whose
work appeared regularly in Life magazine. Perkins was
raised in Los Angeles and New York and took to music at
an early age, perhaps an inevitability if Elvis happens
to be your name. He briefly learned the saxophone –
very briefly, he emphasizes – before picking up the
guitar in high school and taking lessons with Prescott
Niles, one-time bassist for the Knack. While he played
in rock bands, Perkins also developed an interest in the
classical guitar, and began to compose music in both idioms.
He wrote poetry too, and that gradually morphed into lyrics.
After a short stint at college, he began to cultivate
the idiosyncratic, highly personalized style that distinguishes
Ash Wednesday.
“It’s been a long journey, long in the coming,”
Perkins admits, when he discusses the album, and it took
a serious detour on September 11, 2001, when his mother,
a passenger on the ill-fated American Airlines Flight
11 from Boston to Los Angeles, perished in the attack
on New York City’s twin towers, a day before the
ninth anniversary of his father’s passing. Ash
Wednesday has been shaped in part by this tragic event
and its aftermath, but Perkins hasn’t single-mindedly
fashioned a reaction or a response to it. He prefers the
poetic to the polemical; his lyrics often have a whimsical
quality, their melancholy aspects counterbalanced with
an undercurrent of hope. He repeatedly returns to images
of sleep and dreams and flight, as if we might all wake
up at once and find ourselves in a far better place. One
needs no knowledge of his family history to appreciate
--- and empathize – with these haunting songs.
The title track, Perkins explains, “represents the
dividing line between the songs written before and the
songs written after the dark day.” That song occurred
to him literally on Ash Wednesday, February 2002, six
months after the World Trade Center disaster, when he
was in L.A., supervising, of all things, the fumigation
of his parents’ house: “I found it significant
in some way. And the words Ash Wednesday were intriguing
for what they mean in the whole colorful mythology of
the church.” For Catholics, Ash Wednesday marks the
start of the forty days of Lent, a somber time of penance
and reflection. Perkins says that his mother, who was
raised Catholic herself, loved the iconography of the
church and kept religious paintings and statues in her
homes. (“Only the chicest ones,” he adds, with
a smile.) Perkins’ ends his disc with a hushed, hymn-like
ballad named after Good Friday, the culmination of Lent,
a day of mourning that precedes the celebration and resurrection
of Easter. A secular prayer about the solace found in
a song, it was written for himself but meant for us, a
gentle way of reminding, as so much of Ash Wednesday
does, that we’re all in this together.
-- Michael Hill |
|
