E-Mail This Article to a Friend Divine reinvention Aaron Perrino takes charge of Dear Leader BY JONATHAN PERRY

If you’re searching for clues as to why the Sheila Divine, one of the most fiercely followed and obsessed-over Boston bands in recent memory, called it quits despite their ability to pack roomy venues like the Paradise, there’s little need to look farther than Dear Leader’s War Chords EP (Lunch Records). The disc is the debut from Sheila Divine frontman Aaron Perrino’s new musical project. And as the singer/guitarist concedes, the reasons for his old band’s break-up are pretty much spelled out in the first lines of the opening "My Life As a Wrestler," a harrowing song that’s built from a bed of forlorn acoustic guitar, a smidgen of electric Edge-style guitar shimmer, and the melancholic ache that laces Perrino’s pensive vocal. "Lost/I’ve lost that secret hope/The one that made me feel invincible/Where did it all go wrong?" he sings in a gently distressed voice, lingering over the lines as if taking emotional inventory and thinking out loud. "Different personalities . . . wear you down until you’re not yourself/He has my face but it feels like someone else." Those sentiments encapsulate the feelings he says engulfed him somewhere between the Sheila Divine’s disastrous tour of England last year and yet another self-financed trek across the US playing hit-or-miss shows.

"Yeah, it’s pretty confessional," Perrino admits upstairs from the Lizard Lounge, where Dear Leader — a project that at this point includes ex-Cheerleadr guitarist/keyboardist Will Claflin, ex–Tugboat Annie bassist John Sulkow, and ex-Orbit drummer Paul Buckley, who also owns Lunch Records — did a July residency. "I don’t know when I wrote that song," he says of "My Life As a Wrestler," but I’m sure it was shortly after one of those tours where I was thinking, ‘I’m never gonna tour again.’ We went to China, came home for a week, flew to England, lost a ton of money in situations we won’t talk about other than to say that we didn’t get paid for most of the shows, and then we got back and went on a US tour by ourselves. And I think that broke us."

As a last order of business, the Sheilas have a two-night stand lined up for October 10 and 11 at the Paradise. Perrino says it’s meant as a formal farewell gesture "for the fans, because we never really said that we were breaking up." He also admits that it’s a way for the band to pay off some remaining debts. Those performances will cap a remarkable run in the life of a group who won the 1998 Rumble and shortly after signed to Roadrunner Records, which issued their well-received full-length debut, New Parade, in 1999. A string of tours and releases followed, as did the addition of second-guitarist Colin Decker to the core trio of Perrino, bassist Jim Gilbert, and drummer Shawn Sears. They were named Best Local Act in the 2000 Phoenix/WFNX Best Music Poll, and Perrino won BMP honors as Boston’s best male vocalist in 2000 and 2001.

"I feel like we had a good run — we were still selling out the Paradise and playing Avalon, and, you know, we could have milked that forever," Perrino points out, adding that the band members all remain friends (Decker was involved in mastering War Chords). "But I would rather have people say, ‘That band was great,’ as opposed to hanging around forever, releasing more and more records. Also, I was trying to do it as a job, and it just wasn’t paying the bills. I think that the downfall of the Sheila Divine was that it became more about the business than the actual fun of playing music, and I think it showed. I felt like I started to get jaded, and I came home from a tour and thought, ‘This is stupid. If I’m going to make $500 a month playing music, I’d better like it. There’s easier ways to make a buck.’ My premise for Dear Leader is just to get some people who want to play what I record, do some shows, and hopefully it’ll stick. And if not, whatever. Maybe it’s selfish, but I’m really enjoying having all the control."

Perrino describes Dear Leader as both a solo outlet and a shape-shifting collective in the vein of the Willard Grant Conspiracy, which has numbered between one and a dozen musicians, or Conor Oberst’s similarly inclined Bright Eyes. The idea for the project arose out of his tenure writing music jingles for an advertising agency. "That was the first time I had been in the studio in several years where it was just me and whatever I wanted to do. And I had so much fun and it was just like, ‘I want to make a record where I don’t have to fight about everything we do.’ " Perrino began writing the tracks that would eventually end up on War Chords, but he also had a backlog of "failed Sheila Divine songs," as he puts it, to fall back on.

In contrast to his ad-jingle work or that of the anthem-minded Sheilas, much of the new material, which he wrote on acoustic guitar in his living room, sounds muted and unsettled, bleak even. The somber "Slow Death Shadows," a non-EP B-side to the "My Life As a Wrestler" seven-inch single, is a keyboard-laden dirge. Despite the brightening effect of Jack Drag mastermind John Dragonetti’s left-field pop production, War Chords sounds very much like the work of an artist in pursuit of finding his place in the world, someone who’s searching for the means to make a new start. Even the title of Dear Leader’s forthcoming full-length, The Good Times Are Killing Me (it’s slated for September), seems to articulate Perrino’s internal struggle. "I definitely feel like I’m at that point," he says of the emotional retreat that accompanied the demise of his old band. "My 30th birthday is next month, and you don’t want to be that guy who’s like, ‘I play in a band and I’m going to make it,’ but you’re like, ‘Dude, you’re 36, it’s not gonna happen!’ But I think I’m more realistic. I mean, I know I’m always going to play music, but I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do to make money."

Ex-Orbit drummer Paul Buckley, who heads the Salem-based Lunch label, remembers inviting the Sheilas to open a couple of dates for Orbit on his band’s 1998 tour despite having never seen the trio perform live. He compares his first impression to the scene in Rocky when one of Apollo Creed’s fight crew catches unknown challenger Rocky Balboa on television whaling a side of beef bloody. "I said to the guys in the band, ‘Hey, I think you wanna come see this,’ " says Buckley, recalling the first time he saw Perrino open his mouth to sing on stage at the now defunct Club Toast in Burlington, Vermont. "Right away, I knew he was a star."

Earlier this year, when Buckley heard Perrino was holed up writing songs, he offered to put the results out on his Lunch imprint. Little did he know he’d also end up playing drums on War Chords and manning the kit during Dear Leader’s residency at the Lizard. "I definitely made a concerted effort to do what Aaron needed at that point, which was to have somebody to prop him up, to make sure he wasn’t going to fall or falter, and to set up a strategy with him to release music right away. We’ve both been through major-label experiences — him with Roadrunner and me with A&M — and I think Aaron needed to get back to the reason why he got involved with music in the first place, which was the joy of making music and playing in front of people, as opposed to figuring out how to sell records." Buckley expects Dear Leader to tour regionally in support of the full-length, but for now he’s taking a wait-and-see attitude with the EP, which just went to college radio.

For The Good Times Are Killing Me, Perrino often wrote songs the day before he brought them to Dragonetti’s studio, an approach he had never attempted but was eager to try. The experiment appears to have worked: he says it’s the easiest album he’s ever made. "The crazy thing was that I would go in, record it, sing it, barely knowing what I was doing, and Dragonetti would turn it into a song." Dragonetti added combinations of pianos, flutes, and string sections that fleshed out the arrangements and placed Perrino’s familiar voice in fresh contexts. "I think I’ve reinvented myself in the sense that it really sounds different," Perrino says. For one thing, there are few "screamy songs" on the disc. "I kind of got sick of screaming. The full-on scream just doesn’t feel right now — I can still do it but it seems forced."

What Perrino had not counted on was how different — and nerve-racking — an experience fronting a new project would be. He admits that during the first week of Dear Leader’s Lizard Lounge residency, "I was so uptight, it felt like I had never played music before. It had been seven years since I played with anybody else, where it had been that drastic of a change. It was fun, but I was scared as hell. And last week, all of a sudden, it felt like, ‘Okay, I can handle this.’ "

Dear Leader headline T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline Street in Central Square, August 29 on a bill that includes Francine and Emetrex; call (617) 492-BEAR.