Perrone’s self-produced sophomore album, Were You Really There?, is a true bedroom recording, complete with creaks from the frame of his tenement apartment building in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The sparse instrumentation reverberates off empty floorboards, setting the scene for songs about life’s solitary moments: sleepless nights reflecting on past decisions, searching for solace in rural spaces, the drudgery of aging alone.
His deliberate, unadorned performance carries incredible warmth, too, revealing an imperfect narrator who’s both contradictory and sincere. And it’s in that overarching uncertainty where Perrone is the most unveiled — as a humanist who needs “a friend, a purpose, and an open mind.”