Elvis Perkins’ debut album feels both lived in and lived through, combining emotional intimacy with a warm-hearted studio sound that recalls Nick Drake and Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison. It starting life as a collection of home-made demos, which were cut to analog tape, then fleshed out (with the help of a small group of friends and fellow musicians), in a Burbank studio and at a Victorian house in L.A The resulting material is Ash Wednesday, a beautiful album in which Perkins transforms 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 (alongside his three-piece band: bassist Brigham Brough, keyboardist/guitarist Wyndham Boylan-Garnett, and drummer Nicholas Kinsey, known collectively as Elvis Perkins in Dearland) has been doing club dates in the USA 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. Perkins’ live reputation has grown, along with his audience, aided no doubt by enthusing on-line bloggers. After a performance at Rockwood Music Hall, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, 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 a family affair. Wyndham is Perkins’ godbrother. He doesn’t play on Ash Wednesday, although he was present at the sessions, while Nick and Brigham contributed performances. Live, the quartet continually experiments with Perkins’ repertoire, tinkering with the arrangements, playing around with tempos and varying the instrumentation: marching drum, harmonium, trombone, organ, piano, bells and whistles.

Perkins cut Ash Wednesday with his actor-musician brother Osgood on drums and friend Ethan Gold arranging and producing. Recording was very spontaneous in approach, with much of the album, including vocals, consisting of live takes. Veteran drummer Gary Mallaber, who appeared on Van Morrison’s Moondance, guest on a few tracks and heard “While You Were Sleeping” for the first time as he performed on it. Astral Weeks - an evocative mix of folk, rock and jazz with a naturalistic flow of words - was a touchstone, in terms of feel and sound. “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 both mournful and joyful brass bands played at New Orleans funerals and snatches of elegant, understated strings Perkins divides the album into two distinct “sides,” with the title track as the metaphorical side-two starter.

Perkins was raised in Los Angeles and New York. 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 took to music at an early age, perhaps an inevitability if Elvis happens to be your name. He briefly learned the saxophone, 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, which gradually morphed into lyrics. After a short stint at college, he began to cultivate the idiosyncratic, highly personalized style that distinguishes Ash Wednesday, a process which for Perkins was “a long journey, long in the coming”.



In writing, Perkins 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.

Ash Wednesday is an album heavily influenced by Perkins experiences of Sept 11th. 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. “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. The album ends 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