It’s easy to get lost in Elvis Perkins’s back story, but that would be a shame. Perkins, whose debut album, Ash Wednesday, was released this year, is the son of the Psychostar Anthony Perkins and the model/photographer/actress Berry Berenson, herself of noble lineage, including her grandmother, the fabled fashion designer Elsa Schiapperelli, and mother, the Marquesa Gogo Berenson di Cacciapooti.

On September 12, 1992, when Perkins was 16, his father died of an Aids-related illness. His mother was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. While such tragedy is ghoulishly fascinating, Perkins doesn’t need to ride on his parents’ notoriety to attract attention – he actually has something to say.

Growing up in the public eye has made Perkins cautious and self-conscious, but instead of moaning about being teased as “Norman Bates’s son” as a child, he has created an often startling album of timeless, melancholy beauty. Although it is largely a reaction to the deaths of his parents, especially his mother’s, Ash Wednesday is wholly lacking in the narcissism that it would be hard to begrudge him and that usually characterises more typical “singer-songwriter” albums.

Nevertheless, Perkins says: “The songs are probably more about me than about that day [9/11]. The direct references are few and far between. But when they do come about, to be able to say something about it in a different language or approach it from a different mindset is without doubt a form of power. It’s a way of having control in an area where no one has control.”

While the ghosts of his parents haunt Ash Wednesday, family also provides part of the album’s life force. Perkins’s brother Osgood, an actor in movies such as Legally Blonde and Secretary, played drums on four tracks, including the gut-wrenching title track, which is the only song to address the actual events head-on: “No one will survive Ash Wednesday alive/ No soldier, no lover, no father, no mother, not a lonely child.”

As its title suggests, the album is filled with religious imagery. But, although Perkins was raised as an Episcopalian and spent his early years as an altar boy, there is no particular religious bent to the album. “I think I know when I’m treading in biblical waters, but there’s no real message in that way,” he says. “I think it’s just something I absorbed. It’s beautiful poetry they came up with. Powerful.”

As a child he loved singing in church and was then “gently ushered” to the piano by his parents. “I just remember waking up one day and I was at the piano with a teacher,” he recalls. “She was an elderly lady who had clearly had a stroke. I was terrified by her. I don’t remember asking if I could play the piano or what happened before then, but that was my first musical experience.”

Perkins then tried his hand at saxophone before having a revelation in the presence of Prescott Niles, the bass player from the Knack. “I was at a friend’s house in high school, and he had just started taking electric-guitar lessons with Niles,” Perkins says. “I just knew it was something I wanted to do. It wasn’t anything particularly loud or noisy that he was playing. It was just something mystical. The guitar is still a mystical object to me now.”

After dropping out of university in 1995, Perkins spent the better part of the next decade “doing some cross-country wandering”, doing odd jobs, writing songs (some of which appear on Ash Wednesday) and performing at open-mike nights. It took the nudging of a friend, the producer Ethan Gold, to get him to do something more focused with his songs. The album was recorded at very casual sessions, using mostly live takes with string arrangements that “were being transcribed in some sort of shorthand while the cello player was waiting . . . It wasn’t all that calculated, not a lot of artifice or dollar signs in the eyes or anything like that. We were just trying to make a good record.”

Gold’s production lets the songs shine on their own, which isn’t always easy for the spotlight-shy Perkins. “With my upbringing, I would have thought that I would have been a voiceless musician, which is how I started, just the guitar player in a band,” he says. “It certainly never occurred to me that I would be a singer in front of people. It took some sort of leap that I don’t really remember to find myself here.”

Elvis Perkins’s UK tour starts November 2 2007. www.elvisperkins.net. Ash Wednesday is out on XL Recordings

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