“It’s a record that’s been in the offing for a while,” says the songwriter Elvis Perkins about his forthcoming third LP, “I Aubade,” which sees its release on his own MIR label on Feb. 24. “It’s a culmination of past visions, present inclinations and a lot of guesswork. And a lot of accidents.”
Written and recorded over almost two years in locations ranging from Dallas to Los Angeles to Perkins’s home in Hudson, New York, “I Aubade” immediately strikes the listener as an album far removed from its two predecessors, which introduced Perkins, who comes from a talented lineage (he is the son of the Oscar-nominated actor Anthony Perkins and the great-grandson of the designer Elsa Schiaparelli), as an artistic force to be reckoned with in his own right. It’s an intimate acoustic affair, recorded mostly to four-track tape, that reveals itself slowly and rewards patience. The songs are peppered with instrumental curveballs (harps, flutes, a beloved first-generation mini Moog), quirky field recordings and friendly guest spots (from Perkins’ former bandmates Nick Kinsey and Wyndham Boylan-Garnett, as well as the singers Cornelia Livingston and Becky Stark). But at the heart of the matter is Perkins, whose lyrical revelations continue to have a spine-tingling impact.
On “I Came for Fire,” which we’re premiering here, Perkins laments over an ominously distant bass drum. “Enter the night no more forlorn / A tower’s wired to fall to a thorn,” he sings, a subtle nod to his late mother, the photographer Berry Berenson, who died on board American Airlines Flight 11 in the Sept. 11 attacks. While it may not be as obviously mournful as “Ash Wednesday,” his 2007 debut, “I Aubade” feels both more personal and more outward-looking. “The prospect of renewal and rejuvenation and healing and transformation are things that I was thinking about,” Perkins says. “Music has these great powers to heal and transform and awaken, and I feel like it’s my responsibility to try and chip in and spread whatever light I can, to continue to endeavor towards what is good.”
