Spotlight: Elvis Perkins
On an early February morning, Jimmy Fallon, Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney are rocking their way through Swift’s chart- topping anthem “Shake It Off” at New York’s extravagant Plaza Hotel as part of the Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary after-party. Throughout the impromptu jam session, Bill Murray jumps in on tambourine, Dan Aykroyd revives his Blues Brothers persona and Prince leads the ensemble through “Let’s Go Crazy” for a crowd of celebrities equally as accomplished as the performers onstage.
When the blogosphere awoke, they raved about the once-in-a-lifetime collaborations. What they didn’t mention is that Elvis Perkins remained in the background for most of the night as part of the house band.
Show business has always been in Perkins’ blood—he’s the son of two actors—but he’s been shy of the spotlight. For I Aubade, his first album in six years, Perkins escaped the limitations of the studio and hit the road in search of musical salvation.
“I think the urge to try something different—and the urge to not be on anybody’s watch—was what led me to invest in some recording equipment and enabled me to [record] from the comfort of my own home and the American wilds. I think the idea was to step more into the comfort zone and leave the artificial confines of the studio.”
Perkins mentions his early days in Santa Fe, N.M., recording on a four-track, and he adds, “That’s my first association with recording. This was just a return to form, and a break.”
The 39 year old set up shop in a mobile home in Ojai, Calif., among other places, to put the finishing touches on what would become his third full-length effort, an experience that Perkins says was “great” for the overall well-being of the finished product. “I was stationary in a nice man’s front yard, and I did a lot of tracking in there. I recorded a lot of AM static and other sounds from the radio and sort of laid those over some existing tracks and did some singing,” he says.
Perkins goes on to add, “I like finding myself in strange places. I think the environment affects what comes out, and this record would not sound the way it does had I not shaken it up and taken it to different environments.”
The result is a sonically driven collection of psychedelic folk, complete with a kaleidoscope of natural, static sounds that can largely be credited to Perkins’ unique affinity for white noise. “I’ve always been a fan,” he says. “As a kid, I slept to white noise through a wave machine, which I still have and still put on.”
Along with the white noise waves, most of which were crafted on his Minimoog, Perkins utilized the afore- mentioned static waves from the AM radio in his trailer. He made a discovery that he calls “totally accidental” when he first got to the mobile home he’d be recording in throughout the trip. “I turned on the radio, and the AM band was on. And it was just offering up this static sound that had these wonderful cascading oscillations rushing with the static. I couldn’t believe my ears.”
With the help of the trailer’s owner, Perkins discovered that the frequency of the AM waves had to do with the interplay of the fluorescent lighting in the mobile home and could be manipulated by turning on and off various light switches. Over the course of a week, Perkins estimates he recorded hours of various AM waves, adding yet another layer to I Aubade.
The album’s recording process ties directly into its title. “Aubade” refers to, among other things, a “morning love song” and is widely associated with daybreak. “Daybreak is probably one of the first and most welcome revolutions that we, as creatures, experienced way back in the day. And it’s the transformation that we experience daily and nightly,” Perkins says.
After wrestling with the proper way to work the word into the album title, Perkins says he reflected on the process. “[Aubade] means a lot of different things and changes depending on how I look at it or how I think about it or how I pronounce it.”
The refreshing feeling of daybreak aside, Perkins admits, “There’s definitely some darkness on the record and some things to think about.” He continues, “But I also aim to have the music be a source of light and to be a source of inspiration, or to do something in the consciousness of the listener that will lead the listener to a brighter or more grounded place.”
