Mike Hadreas is on a roll. Having been featured on the cover of highbrow gay magazine Hello Mr.'s fifth issue, he's barely decelerating from the critical adoration lavished on his third album, 2014's Too Bright. Wrapping up a tour with indie royalty Belle & Sebastian (which could be seen as a competition for who is the fey-est of them all), Perfume Genius is fresh from Coachella, where his way of navigating his inability to hear himself on stage was to "scream louder and be nastier."
We're sitting down in his dressing room at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, where there's some confusion among band members over a bottle of Flonase and its rightful owner. Hadreas is delicate, soft-spoken, and by turns serious and giggly. He's wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a young Keanu Reeves and expresses surprise that the Bay Area could be this hot. Apart from shows, he's only been to San Francisco once in his life, and that was a long time ago.
It was "when I was drinking, so I don't really remember," he says. "I went with my ex-boyfriend, who was a musician, so I went on a mini-tour with him. It was just a booze cruise for me."
These days, he's mostly into junk food and vaping. In fact, the Perfume Genius Twitter feed could be read as one long, hilarious paean to the languid pleasures of devouring mini-muffins in a plume of smoke that one has just exhaled. Together, we lament the loss of San Francisco's last Chevy's Fresh Mex.
"Fresh-Mex! They have good flautas, if I remember correctly," Hadreas says.
That topic turns into a shared reminiscence of things we've shoplifted. At age 11, he once stole a Details magazine and read it behind a grocery store, feeling so wracked with guilt that he propped it up against the entrance. More recently, he got clever.
"I have stolen plastic mixing bowls. I just scanned one at self-checkout and kept them stacked," he says. "It was from my former place of employment, Fred Meyer, like seven years ago."
In spite of this checkered past, he says his parents are proud of their odd little boy and the adult goth he grew up to be, singing about his lisp and Instagramming pictures of his legs in fishnets.
"It took some convincing," he said. "Not even because of the subject matter; I've been out since I was 14. They've had a long time to get used to that, and before I was out, it was obvious. Beyond that, I've always been a weird little creature-y person, but it took them a long time to realize the music was for real, that I was good at it, and it wasn't just a hobby."
His dad has even set up a Google alert in his name to keep up with news of his son. Hadreas himself no longer does that quite as much. At first, it was legions of trolls — many of them Eminem fans calling him a slut, in response to Hadreas' comments that the rapper is an asshole — but he says that that's died down a bit.
"Also, I don't check as much. I stopped reading my Facebook messages as often," he says. After Too Bright was finished but before it was released, the endless waiting made him highly anxious. "When it came out, I was just reading every review for a while, reading every interview I did. I've since stopped."
What he never stopped doing was obsessing over David Lynch, whose visual mood he considers his biggest influence. For the record, Hadreas was born in Washington state, and his favorite Twin Peaks character is Nadine, the one with the eye patch. Then he tells an anecdote that makes me gasp.
"My babysitter growing up, Phoebe, was in Twin Peaks, and that's part of the reason I became so obsessed with it. When the episode first aired, she was still my babysitter and my whole family watched it because Phoebe was going to be on TV. She plays Ronette Pulaski [who, in the pilot, was raped and nearly killed along with Laura Palmer]. The first couple episodes, she's bedraggled and walking over the bridge."
It's easy to see how something so dark into the middle of family television hour could exert a lasting influence, compounded by David Lynch's interest in femme fatales with red nails. Along with lipstick, red nail polish is Perfume Genius' recurring visual trope.
The genderfuck has led to some confusion that might not occur if "I was full-on presenting in one direction either way," he says. "It's weird, when I don't have my nails on, I feel like a spy. My life is that much easier because I don't have to worry about it. No matter what I'm wearing with my nails on, I can't hide them. So when I have them off, my life is much easier but I feel really guilty. Like I'm not being myself."
Beyond that cycle of guilt, Hadreas admits to being a "binger," both of which he considers unusual for a Libra.
"Libras are about balance, but I like to go far I either direction. I'm trying to switch everything around to restriction. My boyfriend [Alan Wyffels, who also plays keyboards], he's sober, too. He can get as into restricting himself as he does into excess," Hadreas says, laughing. "I'm not that. I'm only into excess. I got into some hairy situations and dirty binges that still make me cringe."
As a reaction against the "pro-family" movement that successfully lobbied to get the promo for "Hood" banished from YouTube, Hadreas wrote "Queen," which includes possibly his best-known lyric: "No family is safe/When I sashay." His impatience with conservative morality notwithstanding, Hadreas believes in God. Giving yourself over to a higher power is one of the more controversial tenets of AA, where he and Wyffels originally met, but Hadreas is serene when I inquire about his spiritual affiliation, pausing at length when I ask for clarification.
"I don't know what it is. It's the same reason why I believe in magic and souls. I need that kind of drama. I like the idea that there's something underneath it all — like that Gwen Stefani song," he says, laughing. "That everything's been taken care of."
While he hasn't achieved that level of demigod status where people regard him as a theological touchstone, as Hadreas' career has progressed, Perfume Genius has become something of a lifeline to thousands of outcasts. On virtually any pic Hadreas posts, people comment to the effect that he has saved them.
"People need it! They're all weird, little — I would have been me commenting on that. People need little weirdoes like me," he says.
It's the most visibly animated Hadreas gets during our entire conversation. He admits that meeting someone who drove six hours to see him, someone who will treasure that ticket stub for years afterwards, is what energizes him after a show he thinks nobody liked. But when I ask about the best part of being famous, his voice nearly breaks.
"I guess just most of the things I'm successful for are the things I was terrorized about growing up," he says. "I've been tortured exclusively about my feminine qualities growing up, and those are the things I've championed in my music, and how I present myself and everything. So that feels great. If I let myself think about it that way, it feels really good."
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