Perukua on the original soundtrack for her new book, 11 songs recorded with Tom Wasinger, Heather Holley and Dave Eggar. One of them was almost prohibited.
Australian-born polyphonic vocalist Perukua has spent thirty-five years on stages across three continents, in halls of up to six thousand, with magazine covers in seven European. This season she releases an unusual project: an eleven-song studio album written as a one-song-per-chapter soundtrack to her debut memoir, The Woman Who Found Her Voice. The record was made with three-time GRAMMY® Award winner Tom Wasinger, multi-platinum producer Heather Holley (Christina Aguilera, Skylar Grey, Jackie Evancho), and four-time Grammy-nominated cellist and composer Dave Eggar (Coldplay, Evanescence, Taylor Swift). Music News caught up with her prior to the release.
Hi Perukua, welcome to Music News. The eleven-song album that goes alongside your memoir is unusual on its premise alone — a song per chapter, written and recorded around an existing book. How did the one-song-per-chapter idea come to you? Was it the album shaping the book, or the book shaping the album? The book shaped the songs. I had around seventy compositions already recorded over the years, so it wasn’t difficult to find the song that perfectly described and transmitted what each chapter was about. Two songs are exclusive to the book — written specifically for chapters that didn’t have a song waiting in the catalogue.
The piece tied to chapter one — the chapter where you describe coming close to taking your own life on a sandstone cliff between Bondi and Bronte — is the one that struck me hardest. There are no lyrics. The vocal is otherworldly, almost psychedelic in its effect. Tell me about this kind of singing. That’s a soundscape — a long-form, wordless vocal piece. I use polyphonic overtone singing. My main tone splits into up to three simultaneous overtones above a fundamental, and the combined range runs from 50 Hz to 11,812 Hz — close to the practical bandwidth of human hearing. Many listeners describe states that feel close to what people report from psychedelics: time stops. They get insights into the present moment, sometimes flashbacks. There is often a strong emotional release. Some describe a sense of something being dropped that they’ve been carrying for a long time.
Who produced the records? There are several producers across the eleven tracks. Tom Wasinger — he’s won the GRAMMY® three times — did with me the production on Great Mother. Heather Holley produced several of the songs. She’s the one who launched Christina Aguilera’s career and worked with Skylar Grey and Jackie Evancho. And Dave Eggar — four-time Grammy nominee, Juilliard-trained cellist, has played with Coldplay, Evanescence, Taylor Swift and Beyonce among many others — brought the strings. They each heard something different in the material, which is exactly what the project needed. The album doesn’t live in one genre. It moves.
Your voice properly stirred the core of my psyche on first listen — it was like it found a back door into the subconscious. And the overtones spread across nearly eight octaves. How did you learn to sing like this? It opened in 1996. I was in the US at the time. The voice that came out of me wasn’t the voice I’d been trained for. The man I was with at the time — a Native American medicine man — told me it was too powerful for humanity. He said I shouldn’t sing like that in public. So for years I didn’t. I kept developing it in private. I worked the overtones. I explored the boundaries of the sound. I think I got close to the practical limit of what a human ear can hear. In 2017 I performed it publicly for the first time — a live show called Voice and Cosmos, six thousand people in the room. The effect was profound. I knew that night the voice was meant to be in the world.
That man becomes a central figure in your memoir, which is one of the most thrilling, vulnerable reads I’ve come across this year — it makes you question your own life. More like a magnifying glass than a memoir. Are these all true events? Yes. Every event in the book happened. The structure is what’s unusual — not the events.
That structure was the genuine surprise for me. You’ve trademarked it as Rabbit Hole Storytelling™ — each chapter descends three layers, from a present-day moment through the immediate cause to the deeper formative cause beneath that. By chapter three I had begun running my own life through it. Few self-help books achieve that. How did you arrive at the idea? I tried to be helpful to women. That’s the simplest answer. After thirty-five years on stages and in workshops, the same questions kept coming back from women in every language — about why they kept making the same kind of choice, why a particular pattern wouldn’t lift. Telling the events of my life linearly didn’t answer those questions. Telling them in three layers did. So I trademarked it because the device was the only honest way I could write the book.
Last one. What’s next — are you taking the album on the road? I think that album is for the book only. Yet it is the way many new listeners can be introduced to my songs. The album is the seed. The live show is the tree. I want both to be available to listeners, but they’re different experiences. The songs you can play in a car. The live work, you have to be in the room. I performed in Europe for many years then took a break and now I have something special to come back with.
Good luck with the release, and thanks for the time. Thank you. It’s a strange and beautiful season — a book and a record on the same day. I’m glad they’re out in the world.
Perukua’s memoir, The Woman Who Found Her Voice, and its companion 11-song album is coming this season. More on her work, the recordings and current dates is at
peruquois.com.
