Feeling Like A Self: A Conversation With Mary Margaret O'Hara And Perfume Genius
Last May, Perfume Genius' Mike Hadreas posted a typically wry tweet about his dream music line-up: "If I curated a festival it would be an 8 hour long buffet and then Bonnie Raitt rides in on a motorcycle with dessert in the sidecar." Who could resist? But when Hadreas was invited to curate a day at the Dutch festival Le Guess Who? in Utrecht last November, his selections were even more tantalizing than finger food and Harleys. Among his chosen acts were noise artist Pharmakon, Welsh psychedelic Cate Le Bon and, most intriguingly, the reclusive Canadian auteur Mary Margaret O'Hara.
O'Hara hadn't performed in Europe since a Christmas concert at London's Barbican Centre in 2008. And Hadreas was about seven years old when she released her lone album, Miss America, 20 years prior. He hadn't heard of it until a journalist asked if she was an influence on his third album, 2014's Too Bright, but instantly fell in love. The connection makes sense. Both artists' lyrics often strive for hard-won happiness while refusing to deny their personal intensity. "Now hit those gleaming faces hard, though they'll try to miss it," O'Hara sneers on "Year in Song," a spirit that seems common to Hadreas' confrontational performances, whether he's singing starkly at the piano or writhing in latex.
In recent years, Hadreas has taken to covering O'Hara's "Body's in Trouble," a song that foreshadows the desire for emancipation from physical form that he explored in last year's spiritual . "You want to kiss, feel, take, hear, ride, stop, start somebody, and a body won't let you," O'Hara sings. In a statement released alongside his cover for Spotify's Studio series, Hadreas writes, "My relationship with my own body
