Interview: Perfume Genius

Perhaps the most pleasing thing about the furiously disseminated backstory of Washington state resident Mike Hadreas, a.k.a. bare-bones balladeer Perfume Genius, is that it plays out like a Hollywood biopic. The human brain is trained to prefer certain narrative archetypes over others, and the 26-year-old singer-songwriter’s is the kind creators of popular entertainment the world over regularly go bananas for.

In a nutshell, that story goes: moves to New York to pursue a relationship, gets fucked up on drink and drugs, flees back to Everett, WA to stay with his mum, spends couple of years getting straight, finds way to channel pain through music, moves to Seattle. It’s got the definite ring of redemption-in-the-movies, hasn’t it?

 

Hadreas pauses a moment, as if weighing up the ingenuity of what he’s about to say. “To be honest, after I moved [from my mother’s] I went back to drugs for a year. And now I’ve been clean for about another year after that.”

You did what? Hadreas gives one of his trademark jittery laughs. “It’s kind of a fragile thing for me — a daily thing. But it does help to talk about it. It’s really strange… I mean, I play in a lot of bars and that’s how I’ve learned to be social. But most of the friendships I’ve had, and the time we’ve shared, I’ve been drinking.

“I’ve been to bars since quitting and ordered a Diet Coke, but it’s difficult. It’s like you’re learning how to be yourself for the first time,you know? I was a lot more gregarious when I was getting high, and eventually a lot of people that liked me originally ended up avoiding me. I think they feel it forces them to look at their own behaviour.”

Did you seek help getting straight again?

“I was really resistant [to the recovery programs],” he says. “I wanted to think I could do it on my own but it’s been helpful. When you see these people from different walks of life with the same problems, you feel more part of the world again. If you’re all strung-out on drugs and you see people going to work and you’re still awake from the previous night, it makes you feel separate from everyone else.”

The Perfume Genius album Learning — released in June this year on Turnstile — was an astonishing collection of spare, emotive piano-and-synth-laden hymnals to a dark period in time, evoking Antony & The Johnsons and Daniel Johnston, among others, and confirming Hadreas as a singular talent for the future. Now deep into the business of composing a follow-up, he’s taking time off from writing with a brief jaunt around Europe.

Do you intend on taking a different tack this time around after the stark self-revelation of Learning?

“Some of the new stuff is less directly documenting my experience,” he says. “I guess it’s more about the healing part that comes after all that stuff. And it’s hard to make songs like that ’cause it could so easily end up cheesy. The challenge is to be honest about that without it coming off a little saccharine, I guess.”

A couple such tracks come to the fore during Perfume Genius’ show at Camden’s Cecil Sharp House, a peculiar community centre venue whose seated faithful spans a surprisingly wide age range. Maybe the oldies just want to mother him (“I do look like a toddler,” he gamely concedes). One track is performed solo with an acoustic guitar, a format Hadreas says he’d like to explore further.

“Yeah, that’s a new thing. I taught myself some chords. I mean, it’s even more simple than my piano playing. It’s nice, though — it forces you to think differently. I like that song a lot. I called it ‘Normal Song’, ’cause it’s with the guitar — just a straight-up singer-songwriter, acoustic-guitar-guy song. Ha ha.”

Now that you’re back on the straight-and-narrow, is there any part of you that wants to fuck things up for the sake of having something to write about?

“I want to sabotage things all the time,” he says. “But I think it’s because I know how to deal with that more than if things are going well. With some people it’s like an addiction — keeping themselves far below what they’re capable of. I definitely have some of that too, I don’t know why.”

Let’s hope this good man doesn’t go keeping himself down any longer.

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