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Your songs are so intensely personal – do you ever feel like you have to hold something back?

Only when I think about it for too long. I retroactively panic, but it feels very natural to overshare in the moment. And I rarely go back and edit. Usually the more uncomfortable the lyric makes me, the more helpful I find it in the long run. For myself and other people hopefully.

How do you feel about performing, especially since your songs are so intimate?

It was scary at first. I enjoy it a lot more now. I was always scared people were going to laugh. That’s always been my biggest fear even beyond music, that people are going to laugh when I’m being vulnerable and serious. And people have laughed, but so what. Nothing bad happened. For all of those assholes, there are 10 that are gonna hug you.

We imagine that being so open about yourself means your fans feel like they “know” you more than they would another musician – what are your fans like?

Some are as crazy as I am but I’ve met audience members that are vaguely normal! They do exist! I get a lot of important letters from people that are very personal and deep. I try my best to respond. It is definitely the best and most intense part of this whole thing.

How do you feel about being compared to other gay singers like Antony Hegarty and Jonsi from Sigur Ros? Do you think there’s such a thing as a ‘queer music aesthetic’?

Well, I love Jonsi and Antony, I don’t mind the comparison. Unless it is a lazy one. I don’t think there’s a queer music aesthetic. I think it’s lazy when people lump all the homos together. Women have the same trouble, I’m sure. If you are vaguely “quirky” you are automatically compared to Joanna Newsom even if you sound nothing alike.

You’ve talked openly about abusing drugs and alcohol – what do you think compelled you towards doing those things?

It was the only thing I found that quieted my mind and made me feel comfortable in my own skin. There is a much gentler way to get these feelings, but it takes work and faith and all kinds of difficult emotions. It’s a lot easier to get high but far less rewarding. Every song I have written has been written sober.

How has your music changed between your debut Learning and Put Your Back N 2 It?

I went into a proper studio – in itself it was a giant step. I wanted the content to be more hopeful and comforting. I wanted it to sound cleaner, but still spare and honest.

You’ve talked about how you like watching fetish movies, and your video for Hood features porn star Arpad Miklos. What do you like about fetish?

I love fetish because it is people knowing exactly what they want. How strange and specific it can be. The look on people’s faces when they are doing something that may seem crazy to other people but completely soothing and perfect to them.

What was your first childhood memory?

I remember overfeeding the fish and they died. I was really in to Gremlins, I used to wait for them at night to appear by the bed. I was excited.

What’s the first record you remember buying and how do you feel about it now?

The Edward Scissorhands soundtrack. Still super influential to me. That movie is the best, I cry every time.

We’re giving out a pair of tickets to Perfume Genius’ gig at the Union Chapel on 6th September plus a signed copy of Put Your Back In 2 It and a t-shirt designed by Perfume Genius. (It’s of Mariah Carey weeping, you’ll love it.) To win, follow and RT @wonderlandmag. www.turnstilemusic.net/perfume-genius

Words: Zing Tsjeng

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Because it’s that sense of forlorn nostalgia and abject sadness – the lacunae in our lives, rather than the things that make us whole and happy – that pervades its ten brittle, fragile songs. Even in daylight, its haunted and haunting, heartbroken and heartbreaking power is ineluctable.

Unsurprisingly, there’s quite a story behind it. After becoming heavily involved with drink and drugs, Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, moved back from New York to his mother’s house near Seattle to find himself again. It was there that the ten songs that form his album took shape and were recorded as a cathartic reflection of everything he’d recently been through.

“I was in a better place than I’d been for a while,” he explains. “I think if I was really entrenched in a lot of the things I was going through I wouldn’t do anything. I mean, when you’re that depressed, you don’t get out of bed, let alone write a song. So I guess I was feeling better. I had perspective on everything that had happened to me. I was still really close to all the feelings and everything, but I was able to get out of them long enough to write something clear and authentic.”

As bleak (and beautiful) as the album is, and as difficult as the circumstances were that inspired it, Hadreas is a surprisingly cheery conversationalist. His responses are careful and considered and infused, sporadically, with humour and laughter. In fact, the man talking bears little resemblance to the fragile, tortured soul that haunts his album, who sounds like he’s going to break and fall apart and dissolve into dust at any given moment.

“I’m not all cheery,” he chuckles, “but I do my best. I don’t carry all that shit around with me. I wouldn’t want to fucking hang out with someone who did that all day! But there’s a…I don’t know.” He trails off, either lost for words or lost in thought, not wanting to summon the darkness that has previously claimed him by thinking about it too much.
Still, considering the abject lows he’s been through – and just listening to Learning gives you a clear idea of where they were and what they were like – it seems that Hadreas is doing incredibly well. But does playing the songs live bring back those times and experiences, forcing him to relive them? Or can he play them and enjoy them now?
“I guess it’s a bit of both,” he ponders. “I don’t want to be dramatic and say that I puke or cry and stuff every time I play them, but sometimes that’s true.” He laughs. Clearly, he’s spent a lot of time working things out in his head. He’s aware of the trap he fell into before – the spiralling drink and drug abuse – and is doing his best to avoid it, and concentrate on his music. It is, in a way, a new addiction that serves as therapy for his old ones.

“Drugs are what took me down really quick,” he explains, “but booze was basically my foot in the door to get all that shit. As soon as I have a sip, I’m obsessed with drugs, so eventually I learned to cut out that first drink altogether. It’s only been, like, I don’t know, a year and a half since I started getting my shit together. I’m still learning how to do that, and then on top of that, trying to do this at the same time. I have faith that it’ll all work out, but there are ups and downs. When I wrote all the songs, I was sober, but after that I wasn’t. It didn’t take me long to get back to an even worse point than I’d been in previously. But I’ve been clean for about a year now. And I’ve realised that I’m capable of pretty much anything, just like anyone else. For a long time I thought that I didn’t fit in and that I was incapable of doing things that normal people can. But I’m singing in front of people, you know. I’m able to do that.”

See Patrick Sher’s video of the shoot here

This article was first published in Wonderland #24, November/December 2010

Photography: Daniel King
Words: Mischa Pearlman

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James Dean lookalike Mike Hadreas (AKA Perfume Genius) was shot for Wonderland by photographer Patrick Sher, a photographer-filmmaker who cut his teeth working with the likes of Terry Richardson and Mario Sorrenti.

With fashion by Bruce Pask, men’s fashion director for T Magazine, it’s all a very nostalgic affair, emphasized by a cut from Hadreas’s latest swooning masterpiece Learning. See the full Wonderland feature, in which Hadreas talks hard times, addiction and redemption, here.

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