Elvis Perkins - Serenades for Judgment Day

It's a sad world after all

It would be the perfect stage name: Elvis Perkins. A kind of tribute to the days of the "Million Dollar Quartet". But it's nothing of the sort: Elvis really is the son of Anthony Perkins, the unforgettable face of Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, who died of AIDS in 1992. His mother, Berry Berenson, a famous photographer for magazines like "Life" and "Vogue", was on board the plane that was the first to crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. A chain of misfortunes worthy of the biography of Mr. E, one that could not help but leave a deep mark on Elvis Perkins's artistic personality.

Raised between New York and Los Angeles, young Elvis learned to play sax and guitar taking lessons from Prescott Niles of the Knack (yes, the "My Sharona" guys...), and made a name for himself touring with the likes of Okkervil River, Pernice Brothers, My Morning Jacket and Cold War Kids. Word of mouth online, plus the inclusion of a couple of his songs in the soundtrack to Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation" and in an episode of "The O.C.", did the rest.

So, having just turned thirty, Perkins arrived at his recording debut in 2007 with Ash Wednesday, gathering a handful of songs with a long gestation, written half before his mother's death (to whom the album is dedicated) and half in the period that followed. Recorded in Burbank and Los Angeles, the compositions on Ash Wednesday took shape with the help of his friend Ethan Gold on production (himself a songwriter seeking his fortune), along with a multifaceted cast of collaborators, including his brother Oz Perkins, an actor like their father.

In short, there would already be enough here to build a textbook indie persona: but Elvis Perkins's music manages to immediately dispel any shadow of skepticism, with its repertoire of songs bearing a classic stamp and noble lineage, vibrant with flesh and blood and haunted by the shadows of ghosts.

Ash Wednesday shows its hand right from the opening of "While You Were Sleeping", inviting the refined eloquence of Leonard Cohen to spend a sleepless night with the torrential sleepwalking of Destroyer. Here, the acoustic guitar and nasal timbre of Elvis Perkins's voice join the puffs of the drums and the gleam of the horns, like a mournful ride toward the dust of sunset.

The gypsy-like swirls of the violin on "All The Night Without Love" dance over the smoky inflections of the double bass. Then, a flash of electricity grants an isolated pop looseness to the Neutral Milk Hotel-like chant of "May Day!", acting as a counterpoint to the funereal cello of the folk waltz "The Night & The Liquor".

The Decemberists of “Castaways And Cutouts” look on approvingly, putting themselves forward as the most obvious touchstone for the atmospheres of Ash Wednesday. The Dylan of the late Seventies is right there too, ready to claim paternity of tracks like “Emile’s Vietnam In The Sky”, whose violin brings back to life the swagger of the “Desire” era. And doesn't the jazzy trumpet of “Sleep Sandwich”, underscored by timpani, sound like it belongs to a Rufus Wainwright stripped of grandiloquence?

But listing a string of models and references isn't enough to capture the essence of Ash Wednesday. Despite the understandable hesitations of a debut, Elvis Perkins reveals his full personality when he isn't afraid to bare himself, as in the anguished swirls and dramatic string tremors of the title track. “All this life is Ash Wednesday”, Perkins solemnly declares. Dust like that of the rubble scattered on the dawn of Wednesday, September 12, A.D. 2001, when the new millennium knew its own terrible Ash Wednesday. “No one will survive Ash Wednesday alive/ No soldier, no lover, no father, no mother/ Not a lonely child”.

The question posed by “Emile’s Vietnam In The Sky” hangs in the air like ash in the wind: “Do you ever wonder where you go when you die?”. And the sadness Perkins murmurs so softly in “It’s A Sad World After All”, accompanied by the intangible echo of Ariana Lenarsky's voice, is nothing but the reverberation of that very same question.

From “Ash Wednesday” to the piano epilogue of “Good Friday”, Perkins seems to suggest that life unfolds along a mysterious trajectory between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, between the awareness of one's own fragility and the reality of sacrifice as the law of love. “Come lay here beside me/ And I’ll fear no death”, is the prayer that inspires the lines of “Good Friday”. Like a clump of dust that never stops demanding eternity.

On any given doomsday

Two years on from his own Ash Wednesday, Elvis Perkins finds himself at the helm of a band of nomadic-spirited musicians on Elvis Perkins In Dearland. More of a family, really: Wyndham Boylan-Garnett, on keyboards, is like a brother to him, ever since their mothers acted as each other's godmother; Nick Kinsey, on drums, has always been Garnett's best friend; Brigham Bough, on upright bass, is an old schoolmate of them both. “Elvis Perkins In Dearland” is the name they chose for themselves: one that sounds like the title of a fantasy tale, the destination of an imaginary journey. Alongside them, the intimacy of the American songwriter's dazzling debut takes on a new visceral quality, leaving behind the sufferings of the past without giving up his own understanding of pain.

“I don't like the term folk-rock”, Perkins says about the music that grew for months on stage alongside his fellow travelers. “I prefer to talk about folk and roll, it better describes the band's experience”. And so his voice sways over the organ-and-harmonica blend of “Shampoo”, dancing with the echo of the classic “Black Is The Color (Of My True Love’s Hair)” over a resolute, sinuous rhythm: “Black is the color of my true love’s arrow, just the color of my blood”.

The driving percussion of “Hey”, with Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond accompanying Perkins' singing, takes on the rollicking flavor of Beirut; the feverish ardor of “I Heard Your Voice in Dresden” takes the shape of a gospel number in the style of Okkervil River; but it's the rousing revelry of “Doomsday” that marks an indelible break from the past, relying on a funeral-band-style fanfare and the tight throb of the upright bass.

The sound of Perkins' band gains in depth thanks to the production of Chris Shaw, who has previously worked with Jeff Buckley, Wilco and Bob Dylan (with whom he won a Grammy for “Love And Theft”). “There's a broader sonic and emotional spectrum”, Perkins himself admits. From the melodic intensity of “Chains, Chains, Chains” it then seems almost natural to move on to the jagged, Waits-tinged blues of “I’ll Be Arriving”, amid thickening organ and brass dripping with the sharp timbre of his voice.

To find the chiaroscuro of Ash Wednesday again, one has to turn to the lulling “Hours Last Stand” or the solitary pilgrimage of “Send My Fond Regards To Lonelyville”, with a gypsy violin and blooming horns leading through streets populated by forked tongues, blind sovereigns, silent hymns and prisms of tears.

The specter of the end of time hovers over Perkins' lyrics like a sign of human mortality, from the fervent final dance of “Doomsday” to the eschatological visions of “I’ll Be Arriving”: “I’ll be arriving ‘til the day I die, when the golden chair it comes down from the sky”. The fate of history is the fate of the present instant: it is given meaning by the spark of eternity that animates the closing of “How’s Forever Been Baby”: “I would bury it in ice for all of eternity to see how’s forever been baby”.

Life is a fleeting breath, barely enough time to count to three and whisper a goodbye. “123 goodbye, I love you more in death than I ever could in life”. That spark doesn't surrender even as night falls: it seems overwhelmed by the darkness, but its glow is already the beginning of dawn.

The album Elvis Perkins In Dearland is complemented, again in 2009, by The Doomsday Ep, which continues (and deepens) the immersion in the roots of Americana, starting with the spectral reworking of the traditional “Gypsy Davy”. The coordinates shift toward the Fifties with the vintage shimmer of “Stay Zombie Stay” and “Stop Drop Rock And Roll”, before giving way to the gospel of “Weeping Mary” and a slowed-down version of “Doomsday”.

From then on, opportunities to hear Perkins' voice become increasingly rare: in 2010 he offers Starbucks' “Sweetheart” compilation his cover of “Teneme En Tu Corazon (Keep Me In Your Heart)”, in 2014 he performs “Congratulations” (written by Dylan for the Traveling Wilburys) on the compilation “Bob Dylan In The 80s”. In the age of social media, his is not simply a withdrawal from the spotlight: it is, in effect, a voluntary exile from digital life, one destined to last almost six years.

I came for fire, I stay for love

Dawn light barely filters through, timid as a whisper. It discovers lovers still embraced, as the arrival of day calls to them. A farewell, a promise. Poets call it aubade: a song of parting, a song of hope. It is a serenade to the sunrise.

For Elvis Perkins, a strange play of assonance mysteriously links aubade to the word "obey": "It made me consider who and what I've obeyed, as opposed to natural and supernatural law." That's precisely why his third album, released in 2015, is titled I Aubade. "To me it's more a present-tense verb than an ancient noun: it's everything I direct my aspirations and hopes toward, offering a hint of dawn to the lengthening night."

I Aubade mirrors the same approach that defined Perkins's long silence: "I grappled with reality," he explains. "Being in my own shoes, in my own life, simply living. Things take time, and time is relative." It's an album that marks a clean break from the past: his bandmates, Wyndham Boylan-Garnett and Nick Kinsey, stay in the background this time, amid a long and varied list of collaborators (among whom the name of John Congleton stands out). Professional studios give way to a four-track recorder, ready to capture sounds and noises within the walls of his home in New York, or in an old trailer, or in various hotel rooms across America. And the certainties of a record contract are traded for the adventure of a self-released label, christened MIR.

A haze of static, shards of arpeggios, the echo of a voice: "On Rotation Moses" immediately sets the tone for Perkins's new musical beginning. It's a grainy, opalescent sound, made of fragmentary melodies and constant interference. At first Perkins had thought of titling the album "Waves": and indeed, the inserts that distort the acoustic framework of the songs do sound like radio waves beamed in from unknown places.

The elegy of "& Eveline" lets itself be cradled by Cornelia Livingston's vocals, while the carousel of "AM" disintegrates into shreds of white noise. There are Cohen-esque ballads in disguise ("I Came For Fire"), and choruses ready to bloom unexpectedly ("My 2$", with help from Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond). And yet, amid gusts of flute, xylophone chimes and analog minimoog tremors, the atmosphere alone isn't enough to make up for the album's lack of truly fully-formed songs, on par with the songwriting of Perkins's earlier work.

Parading brides and Monsanto-branded poisons intertwine in the dreamlike verses of "It's Now Or Never Loves", while in "Hogus Pogus" a pig's heart transplanted into a man's chest offers a sort of sarcastic reversal of Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog".

I Aubade is a hymn to rediscovering the natural laws of living, to the stretched-out time of waiting. A waiting sketched over the milky aura of "My Kind" with a falsetto reminiscent of Devendra Banhart: “Come outnumber the days I have waited/ So many suns erased them/ So grey-faced I have faced them/ League upon league I have turned them/ Awaiting my kind”. To wait for something, you still need to know what hope is. And be ready to keep watch until daybreak.

Two years later, Perkins resurfaces with the sarcastic political invective of "There Go The Nightmericans", a satirical nightmare that seems to emerge straight out of Dylan's "Basement Tapes" . Meanwhile, his collaboration with his brother Oz yields the (almost entirely instrumental) scores for two atmospheric, spectral horror films, "The Blackcoat's Daughter" (later retitled "February") and "I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House". Elvis's voice only makes a brief appearance over the closing credits of the first film, with the eerie falsetto lament of "Outcantation (The Blackcoat's Daughter)".

We have to wait until the pandemic year of 2020 to find him back with an actual album, though. During the lockdown months, Perkins dedicates a video message of solidarity to Italy specifically: "Hi friends in Italy, this is Elvis Perkins writing from California with this ancient Italian amplifier and this ancient Italian blood. Sending big waves of love and light from here to there."

Why can't you be closer to me?

In the beginning there was Marilyn, or perhaps the Great Mother. In 2020, for his fourth album, Elvis Perkins invokes the mythology of creation right from the title. But the cosmogony depicted on the cover looks more like a vision born out of David Lynch's mind: an archaic deity holding up a mirror, a cosmic egg revealing a young Marilyn Monroe, the coil of a serpent, the vault of the heavens... An alchemical dream about the beginning of everything.

Origin myths, as Mircea Eliade teaches us, are the template for all human action. They're the reflection of every rebirth we go through, we might say. And indeed, Elvis Perkins stages the genesis of the universe to talk about himself, about who he was and who he's become.

"They're all songs written a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away," Perkins admits about the nine tracks on Creation Myths: a relic of his first steps into the world as an artist, at the dawn of the millennium. So why record them twenty years later? "I've carried them with me since their genesis, and I always suspected that at some point they'd be documented. But you never know when the right moment will finally come." The right moment, precisely: the moment to look at yourself in the mirror, to search your own face for the marks left by the road traveled.

Anything but a collection of leftovers from the drawer, then. Rather, a rewriting of the past that manages to take the shape of a fresh starting point: "sometimes you do your best work when you still don't know what you're doing." Creation Myths is full of the same singer-songwriter spirit of his early days, intact in a way we hadn't heard since Ash Wednesday. But it also bears the mark of the exploration undertaken on the previous I Aubade, which surfaces in the more oblique arrangement of the songs. And, above all, there's Perkins's voice, sharper and more sinuous than ever as it leads the dance.

With its round rhythm and descending melody, "Sing Sing" weaves between paper skyscrapers and Hollywood astrologers over a flickering haze of mirages. Then, the horns of "See Monkey" recreate the charm of the Elvis Perkins In Dearland band, sketching out the impossible borders of a Balkan, mixed-blood Americana. Strings and keyboards float over the notes of "Iris" with a nostalgia vaguely reminiscent of Beck (see "Sea Change"), while the country-folk breeze of "Mrs. & Mr. E" glides along with an unusual lightness for the American songwriter.

Between sweetly nostalgic ballads ("See Through") and fairground revels of accordions and brass ("Promo"), at the heart of Creation Myths lies an anguished longing for connection with others, coupled with the awareness of an estrangement that seems impossible to bridge. "Does anyone/ Ever know another?", Perkins asks amid the piano and pedal steel of "I Know You Know". “What does anyone want/ From another/ Other than the time/ And the secret number?”. In the Copernican system of the self, the other is nothing but a satellite: "Are we heliocentrics/ Like the summer?".

But it's only a half life, one in which others are mere projections of ourselves. "The Half Life" has the loping gait of a Townes Van Zandt reincarnated in the guise of Andrew Bird: the piano unspools gently, the violin smells of freshly cut fields. Perhaps the only union possible is precisely the one with that which remains wholly other: "Do you think that maybe/ We could make one of two?". A me and a you, the mysterious axis of the cosmos. "Would it ever do/ A me and you?".

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