All about my mother

Elvis Perkins tells Caroline Sullivan how the tragic deaths of his famous parents have shaped his melancholy pop

Elvis Perkins doesn't look much like either of his late parents - actor Anthony Perkins, best known as Norman Bates in Psycho, and photographer Berry Berenson. His slanted, feline eyes give his face an eastern cast that, he says, doesn't run in the family, exotic though the family is. On the maternal side, his great-grandmother was Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and his grandmother goes by the title Marchesa Cacciapuoti di Giugliano.

However, the bonds of blood have been instrumental in shaping Perkins as a songwriter. When he began work on his first album seven years ago, he found himself writing several melancholy songs about his close relationship with his mother. After she died - a passenger on the plane that hit the north tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11 - she figured even more prominently in his songwriting, as he channelled his grief into music. Entitled Ash Wednesday, the album was finally released in the US in February (it is scheduled for next month here) and the American press were vociferous in their acclaim. His songs of "magic and loss", as Time Out Chicago called them, were as much an introduction to Perkins's beautiful, impressionistic folk style as a glimpse of life with, and after, his mother.

"The title refers to being left on Wednesday with nothing but ash, because she died on a Tuesday - being left with ash on September 12. That was also the day my father died, September 12 [1992, of Aids]," he says briskly. "It first occurred to me on Ash Wednesday itself - my consciousness was largely ruled by having lost my mother six months previously." While in Paris, he plans to visit his grandmother, the Marchesa - ostensibly because he rarely gets the chance, but also perhaps to prove to his grandmother, who was "kinda harsh to me and my brother when we were kids", that his decision to make music his career was the right one.

Perkins is being compared, prematurely, to Rufus Wainwright and Nick Drake. It's exactly the kind of hype a new artist doesn't need, particularly one already saddled with the name Elvis. (His mother's choice, apparently. "I'm OK with it now, but at school I was the butt of every joke, and I developed an apprehension of dealing with people, because there was no way of getting off on the right foot.")

Having famous parents has done for many fledgling pop careers, as Sean Lennon, Ziggy Marley and Lisa Marie Presley can attest. Perkins has a psychological advantage in that he never felt himself to be in his father's shadow - although they did call him "Norman Bates's son" at school.

Unlike his saturnine father, Perkins has the slouch and the rumpled dress sense of a mildly bohemian American, and doesn't stand out from the other American tourists in Paris. The restaurant we are in is one of those places that decorate the walls with autographed photos of famous types who have eaten there, which amuses Perkins. "I've always wondered, do celebrities go to these places with a pile of autographed pictures, just in case?" From which we can infer that his father didn't do that. No, Dad was just Dad, though it was "weird" seeing him smooching with Sophia Loren in a film, he says. Perkins was 16 when his father died, and had already been channelling his ambition into playing guitar for five years. "Dad's death was major, but I was young, and more supple or something. Maybe, had he not passed away, I'd have had a record out at 20. Though that, of course, is speculation."

Perkins is not especially forthcoming about his Hollywood childhood, but growing up (with older brother Osgood) as celebrity progeny does not appear to have been a curse. He was a church altar boy, did respectably enough in high school to get into the prestigious Brown University in Rhode Island (for a year only, while he decided what to do next) and poured most of his energy into "writing little songs". Moving to New Mexico and then New York, he dropped the name Elvis in favour of his middle name, Brooke - not for long, though, as "it wasn't much better, because it's a girl's name" - and played open-mic nights in coffeehouses.

"I spent my early 20s tooling around, not sure how to approach music. My songs then were mostly about that, you know, Aquarian thing." By this he means - he is grinning apologetically here - that his star sign supposedly disposes him toward aloofness because he is preoccupied with a sweeping vision for humanity. "Anyway, then I started doing the open-mic nights." As a solo singer-songwriter? "I loathe the term singer-songwriter, because it reminds me of open-mic nights and coffee shops and lazy chord structures." His preferred label? "A recording artist."

Perkins then started working on the collection of songs that would become Ash Wednesday. Several were about his mother. One, Emile's Vietnam in the Sky - a stately violin-embellished ballad that contains the line "Do you know where we go when we die?" - was inspired by a phone conversation with her.

By this point, in 2000 or so, he had a clearer idea of what he was about as a musician, and decided to pursue it with more vigour than he had done previously. "So I moved back to LA in 2001." He pauses to emphasise the significance of the date. "And then, whatever I was trying to do in music and life was greatly altered, to say the least. It changed the way I thought about being a popular musician, because what does that matter, when nothing means anything?"

Had 9/11 not happened, he remarks tangentially, his album might have appeared when he was 25 rather than now, when he is 31 and clearly worried that he is late off the starting block. There can't be many artists whose attempts to make a record have twice been delayed by the death of a parent, and even now, he is torn between trying to get his emotions back into manageable order, and simply wanting to stomp around with his backing band, known as Elvis Perkins in Dearland. (Osgood, an aspiring screenwriter, occasionally drums with them: "He can enjoy playing drums as a hobby, and not be tormented.")

"I still feel conflicted by the horror and violence of my mom's passing," says Perkins. "Death is hard enough to understand anyway, but when you get totally insane people doing a totally insane thing . . ." He stops, perturbed. "Does 'conflicted' sound glib?" No, of course not. "Oh. Well, the trouble about being interpreted in an article is that it only conveys one thing, and there is no one thing." What would he like to get across in this article, then? He says, slowly: "My aim is the acceptance of truth." The acceptance of truth? Like many of his song lyrics, it could mean anything. "Am I happy? Is my glass half full or half empty? Both. That's where it's at. The indescribable 'it'. I'd never call myself happy or sad."

Ash Wednesday is released on July 9.

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