Interview with singer-songwriter Elli Perry

                     Last month saw the release of ​Little Thieves, Elli Perry's latest LP, which has been described as a story of renewal and rebirth, chronicling the journey of transformation and ultimately finding the strength necessary to start again. Perry's voice conveys the very real sense that it has been places, and each song on the record carries testimony to the sense of displacement, heartbreak, longing and scrappy resolve while also consoling the listener in those sweet spots that hide out along the way. Here Elli talks about the ways in which "being more or less permanently transient teaches you a lot about gratitude and respect for the people and places that care for you, take you in, and allow you to keep moving on down the road," how she first started playing music professionally by age 12 and has never really looked back since, concluding that the secret, ultimately, is to just keep going, to make art that you believe in, that can hold you and others up.


AHC: What has this journey in music, so far, been like for you, the highs and the lows, and what life lessons do you feel you've picked up along the way?

Elli: It's hard to separate my journey in music from the rest of my life, because I've been making music for most of my life. I started playing professionally when I was 12 and have spent most of my adulthood on the road. There's a huge degree of overlap in the vin diagram of my personal, professional, and creative experiences. That said, I've learned a lot from touring- about myself, about other people, about endurance and humility. I think one of the greatest lessons I've learned from being on the road is to be aware of the impact I have on my surroundings. Touring forces you into intimate situations with other people- living in close quarters with musicians who you're traveling with, staying with strangers and friends in their homes as you're passing through town. Being a good guest, not just a house guest but a guest in the communities that support you as you travel through and perform in them, is not always intuitive. But being more or less permanently transient will teach you a lot about gratitude and respect for the people and places that care for you, take you in, and allow you to keep moving on down the road. It's taught me to be mindful of how I can give back and reciprocate the generosity that's been bestowed upon me over the years of doing this.


AHC: What first drew you to music and what was your early musical environment like growing up? Were there pivotal songs for you then that just floored you the moment you heard them?

Elli: I think music has always just been a natural expression for me. My parents remember me humming myself to sleep as an infant in my crib, before I was speaking. Our household wasn't musical, but it was very creative. My mom was a novelist and my dad was an editor, so I was surrounded by words and art, and that permeated everything. My dad was a huge music lover, and he raised me on The Beatles. I think listening to The White Album repeatedly as a kid was truly pivotal. The sounds and songs on that record are still really influential for me.

AHC: Do you remember the first song that you ever wrote or played? Or that first moment when you picked up a pen and realized that you could create whole worlds just by putting it to paper? 

Elli: I started writing lyrics and melodies in early childhood, but the first fully formed song I wrote on the guitar was called Bright Eyes. I was 12, and somehow I was convinced or allowed or encouraged to get up and play it at my middle school dance. That was a turning point. The realization that I could take these strands of word and tune that had been floating around in my head, and manipulate an instrument into joining them to become a full song that people might actually want to hear really blew the creative floodgates open for me. I think I wrote the rest of my first EP within a couple months of that initial song and performance, and I did my first show in a bar just a few weeks later.

AHC: Which musicians have you learned the most from? Or writers, artists, filmmakers, teachers/mentors etc? 

Elli: Elliott Smith is probably my biggest hero in the songwriting world. He's been teaching me and inspiring me for 20 years and I still learn so much from listening to his records. Generally speaking, I'm a lot more inspired by and interested in literature than I am in a lot of music. I think growing up in a literary family in the South and reading a lot of Southern Gothic literature had a subconscious but significant impact on the kind of stories I'm drawn to telling and the way I tell them. My friend and producer Adam Landry has also been hugely influential to my current body of musical work and the work I want to do next. He's a phenomenal writer and player on his own, and he really helped breathe life into my songs when we were in the studio working on Little Thieves. He's encouraged me to push and stretch myself with my guitar playing, and has taught me so much about tone. He's the Tone King.

AHC: What do you think makes for a good song, as you're writing and composing, is there a sudden moment when you know you've found the right mix, that perfect angle of light, so to speak? 

Elli: My songs tend to let me know when they're complete. I've had to learn as a writer to service the song, not my ego or my personal ambitions for the song. Sometimes the piece I'm working on doesn't want to go in the direction I want to take it, and I have to honor that. I tend to do my best work when I step back, give the songs some space, some room to breathe, and listen to them before deciding whether or not they're finished. I used to think a song was crap if it didn't come to me fully formed in this inspired moment. These days I write pretty slowly. I usually build up a song bit by bit over the course of weeks or sometimes even months. I get to know it over time, and it's a lot easier that way to sense how much it truly needs. I think a lot of writers tend to overwrite, to add too much, when the message can be so much simpler if you just let it be. 

AHC: Do you consider music to be a type of healing art, the perfect vehicle through which to translate a feeling, a state of rupture/rapture, hope lost and regained? Does the writing and creating of the song save you in the kinds of ways that it saves us, the listener?

Elli: For me personally, the art of creating is unpredictable. Sometimes it takes more from you than it gives. It can demand so much that it leaves you with a deficit. But I've learned to take a comprehensive look at my life when I start feeling that drain. Usually I find there's something else that needs to be balanced or remedied, and that if I address it then the creative work starts to fuel me again. Music has undoubtedly saved me though, many times over. Trying to live without creating would be like trying to live without an arm. I'm sure I could do it, but I don't really know what it would look like. I can't imagine how much more difficult it would be.

AHC: What are your fondest musical memories? In your house? In your neighborhood or town? On-tour, on-the-road?

Elli: Singing Beatles songs with my dad at night when I was a kid; Going to see shows with him- he would regularly come home from work, tell me to be ready to leave the house in an hour, and surprise me by taking me to some phenomenal concert; Singing duets with my friend Samantha Harlow during the months we spent on tour together (her band The Bad Signs is terrifyingly good, and really starting to blow up); Writing from sunrise to sunset and throughout the night in the little adobe geodesic dome I was living in on a mesa in New Mexico when I first started writing Little Thieves; laying down the guitar tracks for Smoking Gun (the first song on the record) in the studio, and realizing that it was finally all coming together after so many years of work; taking turns picking out perfect driving songs with my fiancé on long stretches of highway all across the country. 

AHC: When you set out to write a song, how much does 'where the world is' in its current moment, culturally, politically, otherwise, influence the kinds of stories you set out to tell?

Elli: I think moments of political and cultural crisis are when artists are needed the most. Art helps us connect to our humanity, to our collective experience in the world. It can heal, harness power, and act as a voice for those who need it. I'm a very political person, but I've never been particularly inclined to tell those kinds of stories. That said, at this current juncture in time, I want the work I'm doing to be purposeful. I'm not interested in just making noise for the hell of it, or solely for my own pleasure and fulfillment. I don't think we have need or room for that as a culture right now.

AHC: Do you have any words of advice for other musicians and singer-songwriters out there who are just starting out and trying to find their voice and their way in this world? What are the kinds of things that you tell yourself when you begin to have doubts or are struggling with the creative process?

Elli: Keep going. Let your creative work dictate what you put your energy and focus into, not your ambition. Ambition is far more likely to fail you, and lead you to make choices that won't hold up over time. If you make art you believe in, you will always rest easy and honestly with that knowledge. And don't forget that every storm, personal, professional, or creative, will ultimately pass. The doubt and creative struggle don't go away over time, or at least they haven't for me! So I tell myself these things pretty much every day, ha. 

AHC: Could you tell us about your new album, Little Thieves? I've read that, in part, it's a record about finding the strength to start again, could you talk a bit about what that process musically, creatively and in life has been like for you, and about how this album encapsulates/carries those experiences and that message forward? 
​

Elli: I started writing Little Thieves during a transitional point in my life. At the time, it felt like the end of something. I was going through a long, drawn out separation and divorce, I was creatively drained from several years of really aggressive touring, and I didn't have a lot of love for myself. It took two years to write, and for a lot of that time I honestly didn't know if I would ever finish it. The resulting work surprised me, though. Instead of being some dark memorial to all that had decayed and died, it was filled with hope and strength. In the end I think it helped me to carve a new path forward for myself. I mentioned earlier that sometimes for me creating can demand so much of you that you're left depleted, with an emotional and psychological deficit. Making this album ended up being one of those rare experiences that ultimately restored and repaid everything that it took at the onset. I'm really grateful for that.



Purchase ​Little Thieves @
squareup.com/store/elli-perry

Visit www.elliperry.com/ 

---