Go Away With … Rain Perry

Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Tribune
April 12, 2022

While some musicians prefer to write their music quietly at home, Rain Perry said she needs to get away from her normal routines to get into the proper mindset as a songwriter. “The only way for me to give myself the time and space to truly hash (my songs) out is to lock myself in a (new) room for a few days,” said Perry, who’s based out of California. “(My new record) ‘A White Album’ was particularly hard to write. I dealt with writer’s block like I’d never encountered before — maybe because we were all feeling so emotionally and mentally stuck during the pandemic, and maybe because writing about race in America is a fairly daunting thing to do. So I ended up going away to write several times. I’m lucky because my husband often travels for work and we have a ton of Marriott hotel points. The songs for ‘A White Album’ were written in a little cabin at Sierra Meadows near Yosemite, the Best Western in Bishop (California), the Four Points by Sheraton Ventura Harbor and the Ventura Beach Marriott.”

“A White Album” will be in stores on April 15. For more information about Perry and her music, check out her rainperry.com.

Q: Do you have any vacation plans for this summer?
A: In May, my husband and I are finally taking a European vacation that was originally scheduled for 2020. Three weeks! We’ll be staying at a chateau in France with some friends, which it turns out is a very reasonably priced thing to do if you can get a big group. And we’ll spend a few days in Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris. We also plan to visit Krakow and make the trip to Auschwitz. It’s almost too awful to conceive that our visit to a site of such atrocities depends on the status of a war with many similarities raging just a few hours away.

Q: What was the first trip you took as a child?
A: As a toddler and a young child, I traveled a few times to my dad’s childhood home outside Cincinnati. My vague memories are of running in the snow and building a snowman. I think I loved it! Snow was pretty foreign to a California girl.

Q: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from your travels?
A: The most important thing is to be humble and respectful. Just tread lightly and read the room. (Also,) traveling often brings a person to places where there has been a war or genocide, or where the people are not at liberty to speak freely about their government. You really have to be respectful and let the locals reveal what they want to say about any of these things. I’ve been to Cambodia and to Chile – both (had) some of the most horrific war crimes of the 20th century. The name (of the late dictator Augusto) Pinochet didn’t come up with anyone we spoke with in Chile. But in Cambodia, everyone from tour guides, to tuk-tuk drivers, to people working at museums wanted to talk about the killing fields and tell stories of relatives who had perished. There was the sense of an urgent national push to get these things out in the open. Not so in some other places.

Q: Where are your favorite weekend getaways?
A: When it’s not too hot, I love going out to Joshua Tree and the 29 Palms area. I love the Eastern Sierra Nevada — one of the more desolate and gorgeous parts of California. The Yosemite Valley is one of the most special locations on earth. I live in one of the places that many people consider a favorite weekend getaway, so on the weekends I steer clear of jammed downtown Ojai and stay home.

Q: Do you speak any foreign languages?
A: As a snobby drama geek, I made the mistake of studying French in high school. For a Southern California girl, it would’ve been much more useful to learn Spanish. Now I speak a little Spanish and a little French and I have learned that I’m quick to pick up the essentials of other languages when I travel. I do aspire to become fully fluent in Spanish. I’m working on it.

Q: What are your five favorite cities?
A: New York City, Austin, San Francisco, Venice and Ho Chi Minh City.

Q: Where have you traveled to that most reminded you of home?
A: The Patagonia region of Chile and Argentina looks so much like California, and the unpaved roads that wind through giant Estancias make it easy to blur your eyes and imagine California in the Rancho days.

Q: When you go away, what are some of your must-have items?
A: Oh, I have lists! I’m a total packing nerd and try to be as minimalist as possible. Aside from the usual essentials, I have to have my knitting, and my Moleskine notebooks and my fancy Uniball pens.

Q: What would be your dream trip?
A: It’s not a trip per se, but I dream of having the opportunity to spend a month or more living and working in New York. That’s a life goal, frankly, and I’m doing my best to make it part of my strategy for the project I’m working on.

Q: What is your guilty pleasure when you’re on the road?
A: Yarn stores. I’ve visited them in every quadrant of the world. Yarn from far-off places is the souvenir I give myself.

© 2022 JAE-HA KIM
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.