“While You Were Sleeping“
from the album Ash Wednesday
2007
iTunes
Hypnotic, cryptic, and sweetly melancholy. Also, bracingly produced: what sounds like a simple song for acoustic guitar and voice becomes over a leisurely six minutes an idiosyncratic chamber piece featuring percussion, strings, horns, and some weird, resonant, blowy sort of instrument that I can’t quite place. For everything that is ultimately strummed or beaten or blown or bowed, the arrangement is more subtle than lush, instruments simultaneously playing and calling to mind the silence that exists when they’re not playing. Listen, for instance, to the moment the main drum beat enters — not till 2:06 — and see how it enters your gut at the same time and only then do you realize that, before then, it wasn’t there. You may have already heard tell of Perkins’ tragic back story, but for the record: father Anthony Perkins died an AIDS-related death in 1992, when Elvis was 17; mother Berry Berenson was on one of the two planes that were flown into the World Trade Center on September 11, just 53 at the time. Maybe we all imagine an extra layer of sorrow braiding through the music as a result but to my ears, yes, there is a sublime sort of sadness infusing both his words and his voice.