Perfume Genius: Body Talk

“No family is safe when I sashay.”

If there were an award for greatest lyric of 2014, that one would be hard to beat. Equal parts sarcastic and defiant, the line arrives like a sneering, snarling battle cry midway through Perfume Genius’ “Queen,” the statement piece of a first single off his third and most recent album, Too Bright.

“It’s one of the first songs I wrote where I’m singing at people, you know, instead of for them or for me,” Mike Hadreas explains of “Queen.” “I was kind of wagging my finger at people a little bit.”

Finger wagging is new territory for Hadreas, who initially made a name for himself with albums of piano ballads that fell somewhere between Rufus Wainwright and Adele, but the new sound fits him as perfectly as the studded tank top he wears on the album’s cover. The follow-up to 2012’s critically acclaimed Put Your Back N 2 It, Too Bright, as a whole, both sonically and lyrically adopts that same defiance that drives “Queen,” making for a collection of songs that finds Hadreas at both his most visceral and his most creatively liberated.

Hadreas worked with Ali Chant, Portishead’s Adrian Utley and PJ Harvey on the album, turning to collaborators both old (Chant) and new (Parish) to bring his vision for a more aggressive, more experimental sound to life. What began as an assortment of ideas and feelings soon turned into a collection of songs that would open new doors for Hadreas both creatively and emotionally.

“The first song I wrote of that batch of songs that ended up on the album is called ‘I’m a Mother,’” Hadreas explains. “It’s kind of really strange and slow and my vocals are pitched really low. A few of the words are just gibberish. It’s all very different than what I had done before, and it was different than all the music I was trying to write for months before I made that song. But that one felt a lot more creative, a lot more me, a lot more exciting in a lot of ways.”

As Too Bright began to take shape, a theme emerged, one that would, after its completion, define the record: Hadreas’ complicated relationship with his own body. That theme is at its most literal on the song “My Body,” a track detailing his struggles with chronic illness that also happens to be the album’s most experimental.

Given that Hadreas suffers from Crohn’s Disease, it should come as no surprise that his feelings toward his body are anything but straightforward. “I guess a lot of my thinking is wrapped up in body stuff,” he says. “I’m not certain how that happened or why I’ve attached so many things to it. I think it’s because I was sick a lot growing up, and also just the way I look is such an easy place to put a lot of my anxieties. When they’re generalized, you know, I don’t really know what to do with them so I’ll just pick at my face. It’s a good physical thing to blame, when things happen.”

Hadreas’ identity as a gay man, a prominent focus of both “Queen” and its accompanying music video (which features Hadreas both confronting a reflection dressed in drag and using a conference room table as a runway as confused businessmen look on), also figures heavily into his relationship with his body and its implications on the album.

“My boyfriend and I moved like 40 minutes south of the city and it’s still a pretty liberal area,” he explains. “And I’m a lot older and I’m not in high school anymore, but people still, every once in a while, will yell something at me on the street because my nails are painted. Even if it’s not directly rude, I will notice that I make people uncomfortable at a gas station or something when we’re on tour in the South.”

Hadreas has made clear that  Too Bright  provided a vehicle to express some long pent-up feelings, and it’s clear from talking to him that the process of getting those feelings out into the world has made his body less of a prison and more of a creative weapon.

“All of those little moments used to really embarrass me or make me feel kind of ashamed, like there was something wrong with me,” he says. “A lot less now than when I was growing up, but eventually I was just sick of feeling victimized and having a guard up and feeling sorry for myself. I just wanted to take all of those moments and flip them and throw them back at everyone.”

And throw them back he did, sashaying the whole way.

This article appears in our January/February 2015 “30th Anniversary” issue. Subscribe here.