Four years ago, Tyler Perry’s stepfather offered him a job in the office of his dog-training company in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Perry had little else to fill his time: he was 29 and living in his mother’s basement, uncertain what he should do with the rest of his life.
In 2017, he had left Berklee College of Music, where he had ostensibly studied songwriting, but largely smoked weed and skipped class. The songs he wrote then were introspective and folk-driven, in the lineage of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith – artists he had been drawn to in his senior year of high school, who had spoken to him just as depression had first set in. “I was depressed for, like, 10 years,” he says.
In idle moments in the office, he would scour Craigslist, imagining a different life in New York or Nashville or LA. One day, on a whim, he applied for a recruitment job at a commercial real estate company in Los Angeles. He lied about his experience, and the fact he didn’t have a degree. “I just wrote a really good email,” he says. “And 20 minutes later they called me. I went through two interviews in a day, and then they said: ‘Can you be here in two weeks?’” Perry had never been to Los Angeles. That evening, he talked it over with his family and friends. “And my mom said: ‘What do you have to lose? A few thousand dollars? You can always come back.’ So I moved to Venice Beach, California.”
In a clip of Perry that began to circulate online last autumn, the singer was filmed at Eagle Rock bar The Fable performing Help Me Out – a song that longs for self-acceptance the way one might yearn for a lover. He moves around the stage with a sensuous majesty, a large man in triple denim, flicking his hair, courting the mic stand, his voice moving effortlessly from earth-deep to celestial. There is something of Elvis and Roy Orbison and Harry Nilsson; the kind of easy, confident performance that feels like alchemy.
In person, Perry is a faintly beatific presence, sitting in a Brighton cafe in the gap between shows at the city’s Great Escape festival. He speaks gently, his conversation ranging from the suburbs of Rhode Island to the free kombucha at WeWork via countercultural philosopher Alan Watts’s thoughts on ego. What quickly becomes clear is the distance between the solid assurance of Perry’s stage self and the more tentative man sitting across the table.
Before all of this – before the dog-training office and the real estate application – Perry had begun working with a counsellor and dietician named Courtney Huard. For a couple of years the pair worked on improving Perry’s sense of body positivity and mental health, and the impact was immense. “She was an incredible person and I’m really lucky I came across her,” Perry says. Around the same time, he discovered the work of self-help teacher Eckhart Tolle and his book The Power of Now, and took an Enneagram personality test. “I pinned my personality to a wall, and I got to see it for the first time,” he says. “And it shocked me out of depression. I had this kind of spiritual awakening.”
The problem was that this newly awakened Perry did not fit quite so well with his catalogue of melancholy folk songs. For years, when he played live, he had hidden behind his guitar, his voice flat and whispered. “I was wanting to be ‘cool’ in that sense of ‘mystical, can’t grasp it …’” he says. “But I don’t think that’s necessarily me.”
In California, he lived out of a suitcase, worked for the property company in the day, and at night played open mics across the city. Mostly he would play a couple of his own folk songs, and then a cover of Roy Orbison’s Crying. It was this last song that hit the sweet spot. “People would freak out, and it would be like it was my birthday,” he says. “Everybody in the place looking at me and clapping.”
He realised that covering Orbison’s song called on the skills he had first learned doing musical theatre in high school: a supported singing voice, a sense of generosity and occasion. Perry wondered if this might be a new direction for him – one that drew on all of his musical loves, from showtunes to Fleet Foxes, via Jonathan Richman and the Who’s 1969 rock opera, Tommy. He dreamed up a character for himself, called it Tyler Ballgame – a nod to the nickname of legendary Boston Red Sox baseball player, Ted Williams, and a joking put-down to himself, a man who had spent years squandering his talent in his mother’s basement, being the very opposite of a sporting legend. He set about working out how this Tyler Ballgame might write and perform.
At Berklee, Perry had attended a performance studies class taught by Livingston Taylor (brother of singer-songwriter James Taylor). The classes were held in a theatre, and on the first day, Taylor invited each of his 40 students to stand on the stage. You had to go up and hold your palms out to the audience, and shift your weight from one foot to the other in time, and look everybody in the eye. It struck Perry as brilliant.
In Los Angeles, Perry remembered the class, and it struck him as an act of radical presence; something Tyler Ballgame might do. He started to try it in his live shows. “I’d reach out to the audience and look them in the eye. Like, we’re both here to do something. I’m trying to connect, and we’re going to live this experience together.” The songs came with an ease. Soulful, and sad sometimes, but also brimming with something hopeful and alive. They carried the richness and simplicity of the classics.
Perry relocated to East Los Angeles, began collaborating with other neighbouring musicians, and playing live as much as he could. One day, the producer Jonathan Rado, famed for his work with Miley Cyrus and the Killers, happened to see an Instagram story of a Tyler Ballgame show and contacted him. The singer went over to Rado’s studio shortly afterwards and over the next couple of weeks, the pair recorded more than an album’s worth of material.
Word of Tyler Ballgame soon spread, and by last autumn, record labels had begun making fevered bids to sign him. In the end, Perry went with the British independent Rough Trade, connecting with them over a shared love of Nick Drake and Arthur Russell. “I had a lot of options and it was really flattering and really crazy,” he says, “but I just kept coming back to Rough Trade, because of that kindred spirit of whatever music I make naturally, in my soul, they already love, because they’ve already put out all the music that I love.”
Perry makes for easy company, and after an hour and a half of conversation I ask if there is anything else he might like to tell me. “I don’t know,” he says slowly, and hesitates. “Maybe I’d like to mention my counsellor, Courtney, again,” he says. “She had her life taken, really horrifically.” Huard was killed by her husband, who later killed himself. Perry learned of her death when a friend sent him a news article from his local newspaper back in Rhode Island. Perry saw the photograph and was stunned.
At that precise moment he had been writing Help Me Out, a song largely inspired by Huard. “She made me realise your value is not tied to the size of your body, or how people look at you – things which had kept me from even being on stage at all.
“There are so many people on the messageboards of her funeral posts and her obituary saying: ‘She set me on the course of my life.’ She was a really special person, and it just shows how precious life is. So I live for her.”
It is a hot afternoon, but Perry takes to the stage at the UnBarred Brewery wearing a woollen jumper. He looks out to the crowd, gently spreads his palms, and begins to sing. It is a golden performance, the songs sounding almost as if they have always existed, and Perry entirely mesmerising.
As he plays, I think of something he told me over lunch – about the freedom and fluidity of performance. “I want to be totally in the flow state, like gone,” he said. “Where nothing is canned or prepared or contrived.”
Some shows, he told me, you get it, and the rest of the band get it, and the audience gets it, too. “And then it’s like real magic. It’s a celebration of the joy of performance and the joy of music.” Today as Perry and the band play, the air is filled with a kind of joy – with something like real magic in the warmth of a Sussex afternoon.
Tyler Ballgame’s new single New Car is out now. He plays the End of the Road festival, nr Blandford Forum, 30 August, and The Lexington, London, 10 September.
