| As a general rule, children of celebrities – especially those who follow creative pursuits of their own – don’t like to be defined by their parents’ careers. Take Joe Hill, the son of celeb novelist Stephen King. Hill writes under a pseudonym, and until the publication of his novel Heart-Shaped Box, he kept his true identity a secret even from his publishers. Elvis Perkins, however, doesn’t have the luxury of anonymity. The singer-songwriter’s music is so inextricably linked to his parents that he finds himself forced to talk about them every time he does an interview. The catch is, it’s not even his parents’ lives that the press are interested in. It’s their deaths.
Perkins is the son of actor Anthony Perkins (best known for his role as Norman Bates in Psycho) and photographer Berry Berenson. The elder Perkins died in 1992 after a very public battle with AIDS, when Elvis was only 17. Berenson was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11. Like many young musicians, Perkins dealt with his anguish by turning to his guitar and writing songs.
Earlier this year, nearly six years after the loss of his mother, Perkins released his debut album, Ash Wednesday. The songs are arranged in more or less chronological order, with the first half of the songs (some of which are up to eight years old) pre-dating September 11, the other half having been written afterwards. It’s a heavy album that deals with many of the big questions that have plagued Perkins since he lost his father, but the singer says that music critics haven’t been completely accurate when speculating that the songs are solely about his parents.
"I think in man’s ever-changing attempt at making sense and ordering what really can’t and shouldn’t be ordered, it’s the easiest and quickest thing that they go to and have been told to go to," he says. "But I don’t think it is necessarily helpful or certainly not essential to understanding the songs. Only a few of them allude at all in any particular way to specific events or people including my parents or anybody else."
When speaking about his loss, Perkins is articulate and open but remains emotionally guarded, which is the same feel that runs through Ash Wednesday. Perkins sings with a deadpan delivery that’s been widely compared to both Leonard Cohen and Neutral Milk Hotel and laces his observations about life and death with a sense of wit that makes the album much more than an audio diary entry. Perkins says that while he did try to make the songs palatable to a potential audience, they also help him to sort out his own complex feelings.
"I don’t think it’s unfair to say that some of the songs do have a sense of humour," he says. "I think they do and I think that’s part of what makes them bearable. But it’s hard to say, sometimes I feel like I’m pretty dislocated from the past, or the past pre-that disastrous day. I feel like two different people and that that day I was cut off from the former version of myself. Perhaps I sometimes feel like the songs on the latter half of the record were written by a completely different person. But I don’t believe that now that I’m talking to you about it, or when I’ve talked to other people about it."
That conflict of emotions is exactly what makes Perkins’s music interesting and the album is certainly a compelling piece of work even without the artist’s personal back story. Ultimately, its connection to any real life events is only really relevant to one person, and that person is Perkins himself.
"(September 11) was a sprawling event for everybody and it was a sprawling event for me internally as I know it is for the planet and the course of history and all of that," he says. "It’s almost too much to take in and too much to attempt to speak about in regular language. Which is in part where I feel so fortunate to have my own language with which to even begin to address anything related." |
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