Ash Wednesday won instant acclaim for its sparse, brooding folk pathos upon release, by which time Perkins was back at Brown. "I wanted to get out of LA and I sensed that I'd be touring because of the attention the record was getting," says Perkins. "So I re-enrolled, basically as a way to get back to Providence and form a band with some guys I'd been playing with there." The band, although cheekily named Elvis Perkins in Dearland, was further comprised of multi-instrumentalists Brigham Brough, Nick Kinsey, and Wyndham Boylan-Garnett, and had a shared dynamic the leader had missed during his time as an unaccompanied solo performer. Elvis Perkins in Dearland toured in support of Ash Wednesday, recorded an eponymously titled follow-up for XL in 2008, and did more roadwork in North America and Europe.
The rootless Perkins got to know the Hudson Valley while staying at Kinsey's family's home in the Dutchess County hamlet of Stanfordville between tours. "Wyndham's also from the area, so with both of those guys having graduated I wasn't gonna go back to Providence," he says. "This neck of the woods began to feel like home." He made one more release for XL, the 2009 EP Doomsday, and rented a place in Germantown. There, he settled in to begin work on the batch of intimate, self-recorded songs that comprise I Aubade (its title a pun on the word aubade, meaning a morning poem or song, and the phrase "I obeyed") and harken back to four-track experiments he'd done in his early 20s, long before Ash Wednesday. Sojourns took him back to Los Angeles and other spots to record with friends and collect some of the incidental sounds mixed into the songs on the new album (the mysterious radio waves on "AM" were picked up in a mobile home in Ojai, California). But the bulk of I Aubade was cut in Germantown and at his current apartment in Hudson, where he taped the sounds of fireworks and thunder by sticking a microphone out the window.
"Elvis definitely has an individual approach," says Kinsey, who contributes percussion to the disc. "Even now, after playing with him for 10 years, his songs still reveal new things to me."
At the time of the interview for this writing, Perkins was in Los Angeles to work on the soundtrack of February, his brother's second film as a director, and to perform at a benefit concert for Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, the West Coast-based charity organization that assists uninsured musicians with medical costs. Speaking to the Guardian in 2007, he remarked, "I'd never call myself happy or sad." But, having heard his recordings, which are indeed sometimes sad, and having seen his performances, which are often euphoric and uplifting, it's tempting to say he's both.
"Well, we all have an equal potential to express a range of emotions," he offers. "But I'm definitely not inclined to be a downer when I'm in the position of entertaining people."
After all he's been through with the tragic loss of his parents, wouldn't it be easy to be bitter?
"It would seem a terrible waste to be bitter," he says, after pondering a bit. "My parents were amazing people, and I feel very lucky to have arrived on Earth literally through them. To be bitter would be a path that wouldn't honor them, or my own life. Or the mystery looming behind it all."
