Perfume Genius Sings the Body Electric
On a warm, late-March night in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from where Walt Whitman once visited Union soldiers and wooed his beloved Irish horse-car conductor, Mike Hadreas took the mic for a sold-out show. As Perfume Genius, his stage name, he quickly settled into the lilting groove of “Your Body Changes Everything,” from his acclaimed 2020 album, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. He pitched his voice low and strutted across the stage, charging the room with a current of sexual energy that, to quote a poem by Whitman, “is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, / It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees.”
Throughout the concert at the historic 9:30 Club, Hadreas shape-shifted, yielding himself to the music’s demands. On “Jason,” a ballad of seduction, he turned vulnerable, whispering the lyrics in a falsetto. Reclining in a
