Andrea Perry

Born into arguably the most adventurous year in pop music history on August 8, 1967, and the product of both the weirdness that was the '70s (bubblegum music, Free to Be...You and Me) and two musical parents -- her pianist father, a music professor, and her mother, a classical composer and performer as well as the producer and host of KMFA's Into the Light radio program -- Andrea Perry was perhaps destined to take up the musical trade. And after hearing her parents' Beatles albums, the sole pop band spotting their LP collection, that is precisely the road she decided to travel, though it took a lengthy gestation period before she finally realized her longstanding aspiration. When she was five years of age, Andrea Perry's family moved from Ohio to the musical hotbed of Austin, TX, where her father had accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas. Perry tried taking the requisite piano lessons, but soon begged out of them, citing the fact that the Beatles also were unable to read music. Nonetheless, she continued to plug away at the instrument on her own, and by the time she was ten or 11 knew that she wanted to write songs. Perry listened obsessively to Top 40 radio, an avocation that continued until a boyfriend introduced her to the Clash, the Talking Heads, David Bowie, Lou Reed, the Police, and the Pretenders when she was a teenager. With those bands as guideposts and with a borrowed four-track machine, she began making her first recordings throughout the summer before going to college. At the University of Southern California (where her father now taught) for her freshman year, Perry bought her first electronic keyboard from a member of Animotion, as well as a used four-track and a $40 microphone, and continued her progress apace. At Hampshire College, to...