The Flames of Truth: Elli Perry's Totality & the Long Road to Authenticity

           Photography by Cory Marshall Spangler



​          Sometimes the heart sounds like something dying. In the split second between one beat and another, such silence feels like the end. But another beat comes and transformation is never as far behind as it feels in those long hours of the rut. Our strength is our ability to create from impossible ledges of self, to break out of restraints that only ever in-authenticate our soul-telling and get in the way of the flames of truth. 

Following the release of last year's Little Thieves, Perry struggled to find a way to share her work more authentically, from the bottom up. Discouraged and disheartened by the constant efforts to turn her art into a brand, the endless press cycles of getting oneself "out there" in front of audiences that may or may not even have the stomach for the soul food that has been painstakingly prepared from the internal reservoirs of one's being. You can't over market truth without losing some of it along the way. The creative heart gets locked in smaller rooms than one can afford to be in when the art is the mission and the gift is the telling.

"The whole concept for Totality", Perry says of her latest EP, "was a creative remedy for the depletion and disappointment I felt in the wake of my last release." Perry and her husband, having spent a lot of time on the road, and living from their RV, set up camp in their friends living room in Colorado, where, inside a blanket fort with a microphone, Perry began singing into the totality that marked her year. Loss and recovery were stories that needing telling, and there are never easy words at hand for such a thing. But the artists' mission is quite literally the impossible, to dip into painful stores of the self.  As Robert Hass once wrote,"You feel pain singing in the nerves of things; it is not a song." It is bare and agonizing life at first, and then it is the song that gives us distance, healing, hope, happiness.

Hardwood Floor, the first track on the album, has the feel of old folk pouring out of barn doors in the dead of summer. It speaks to an overcoming and the slow trusting of new legs. This is a walk you've never walked before and it takes getting used to, these new and good things that can happen on the other side of struggle. "You don't have to go back to a hardwood floor," are Perry's first words and a deeply felt prologue to this richly layered album. "It's been coming for a while, you can feel the change in the air." 

The song, Perry says "was written as a gift for my husband as he was struggling through a particularly painful period in his recovery from addiction.  It was my way of saying "Be gentle with yourself.  You're changing.  This part will pass."

"The past year", Perry says, which informs every muscle of this EP, "was a year defined by recovery, suicide, immense joy and love, immense loss, and an intense reckoning with the self." Jung once wrote: "That which you most need will be found where you least want to look." And it is into that place that Perry dug, bare handed and intent on finding what was corrupting the soil. New seeds mean new yield mean new hope. Hope isn't a brand, it's a flame and nothing can contain it when it is well fed. Creative truth stokes those branches and our listening ears take it in like a medicine. 

"In contrast, Perry says, "Medicine Man" was a song I wrote very recently, as part of coming to terms with my own recovery. I've been sober for almost two and a half years, but feel that I'm only now beginning to have a true understanding of how much healing I still have to do. It's been an uncomfortable truth to face, agonizing at times. The resulting song is a conversation with myself in the face of that truth, a simultaneous accusation and acceptance.

"Without You" is a love song, plain and simple. It's the kind of song I used to think I was not capable of writing: something that wasn't weighed down by its own vulnerability, but actually feels good and light because of it. My music has always tended towards heavy. I've discovered that once you're pegged as being a "sad bastard singer-songwriter" it's kind of hard to separate yourself from that caricature. Hopefully this song shows that even sad bastards can be fun sometimes."

Perry's haunting cover of Chris Cornell's When I'm Down, the epilogue of totality, is an incredibly meaningful recording for two reasons. It is an attempt to reckon with the inconceivable, unbearable loss of one of Perry's close friends who sadly took their own life, and to speak this loss through a song that has carried huge emotional weight for Perry throughout the years. In addition it was recorded with Bryan Gibson, who spent the last five years with Cornell as a touring duo. The difficulty of covering the song in a way that didn't feel exploitative weighed heavily on Perry's heart and mind.  

"I was conflicted about recording "When I'm Down," Perry says. "I think a tribute of that nature requires pause and contemplation. I remember the day after Chris' death was announced, a band I knew released a live video of one of his songs through a major music outlet.  Maybe the sentiment was earnest for them, but it seemed so exploitative to me; like a quick and easy way to capitalize on a loss that had generated a lot public attention. I didn't want to do anything like that.  But I played a show in Chicago a day or two after he died, and quickly picked out an arrangement of it just before going onstage. I stumbled through it that night, and it ended up becoming a pretty important part of my live show for the rest of the year. Bryan Gibson (my cellist and close friend who spent the last four of five years of Chris' life touring as a duo with him) and I actually talked about covering it together before he ever even met Chris. Bryan and I had been out of touch for a while by the time Chris died - he had started a family and I had been traveling for a couple of years.  But I had lost a close friend to suicide a few months earlier, and was still very deep in the grieving process. I reached out to Bryan as soon as I heard the news  and that put us back in touch. When I finally decided to record the song, I asked if he would play on it with me. Had he said no, I don't think I would have tracked or released the song at all.  I felt like it could only be done with the two of us together, and that if he wasn't comfortable with it, I should probably take it as an indication that it was something better left undone.  Fortunately though, he wanted to do it.  I can't speak for Bryan, but I believe it was cathartic for both of us."

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​It is the hardest of losses to grapple with. You are always left wondering what you might have missed in the other person, signs of struggle and pain that were kept hid, just below the surface. Could you have done more, could you have done anything? We ask ourselves all sorts of questions to which there are no answers. The grief is too huge for answers. The song, sometimes, is big enough to carry us through the hurt. Friends, family or lovers, the loss of them is always with us and that time of day, where we feel them enter into the room of our heart, will come and go and come again.

It is said there are no straight lines in water, only infinite bending and turning. Every road will fork into shadow and back out again. Perry's is a desert-burning voice that has taken getting lost as an indication of getting found. The only way out is right through the heart of what hurts. Fearless is Totality's twin, not absence of fear, just less. We are, after all, born in the hurt that we are. 

Totality bears the weight of what it means to live with the complexity of who we are as human beings having human experiences that we don't always know what to do with. Perry's rare gift is to be able to make sense of this endlessly confusing human flow we call our lives. Authenticity is just that place where the heart speaks for itself, the inner singing voice of what holds true. It's a bittersweet spot. We don't always shine when we're in it, sometimes we quiver and shake, and sometimes we dance in joy, to a song like Without You, where profound words still flow in the midst of the feel-good, "I know what it is you're tying to say when the words don't come out right."

Listen to Totality on SoundCloud & Spotify or purchase it on itunes.
Visit www.elliperry.com/ for more.
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