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If All Children Believe in Heaven, as the title of Bocephus King’s fourth album suggests, it must be because the dealers and dreamers who haunt the dime-bag tombstones of the album’s landscape are firmly entrenched in the hell of the present.

A conversation with Jamie Perry, alter ego of Bocephus King, speaking from his home in Point Roberts on the Tsawwassen peninsula, unveils his ghosts. For instance, it explains why the newly-released album, like those Bocephus King albums that came before it, chases the atman of Townes Van Zandt through vaudeville, pausing only to nab Alejandro Escovedo’s guitar pick from the pile of coloured broken glass and dreams in back-alley Nashville.

For starters, Perry grew up in Point Roberts as it shrank from 8,000 people to the current 800, causing unemployed residents to make suicide an all-too-regular occurrence. There were two sisters and six brothers in his family and times were tight. "There’s times when you grow up with maybe too much freedom," says Perry. "My parents had a lot of understanding, to say the least. There wasn’t a lot of money, but there was a lot of chaos."

Thus, it was no big deal that Perry was playing in bars by the time he was 16 and became well versed with the drug dealers, dreamers, barflies and babes that press their hands against the glass inside his songs. By the time he was 19, he split for Nashville to cut his teeth on his dreams. Instead, he nearly broke his jaw on reality’s edge. Fifteen years later, he’s earned perspective on the year-long horror story.

"I’m just getting over a lot of problems I developed in Nashville. I’ve always lived not carefully. In Nashville I crossed a line and remained tumbling for years," he says. Perry’s line involved heavy drinking and doing cocaine, partly brought on by meeting homeless people and gas-station attendants who were better songwriters and guitarists than he was, and partly by the town’s culture, which he says is as dangerous and vapid as Hollywood’s. When he took a job as a songwriter in a cubicle, bemused colleagues nicknamed him Bocephus King because his songs were clones of Hank, Johnny and the other old-time stars they labelled Bocephus country. He’d never heard of Garth Brooks or country pop at that time.

"I came back a lot more cynical than when I left. I’m kinda proud of myself now when I think of being 19 and just going to Nashville. I know Nashville now, where it sits like a Hollywood, and how unimportant it is – how unimportant so many of these things are," he says.

In spite of being plagued by his addictions over the course of his three previous Bocephus King albums, he developed a faithful following in Italy where he routinely sells out soft-seater venues. What makes All Children special is not just its nearly indescribable wild-swerving drive-by musical style that rams into musical theatre, sideswipes soundtrack-style songs and ends up deep in the parkade of music's beautiful dispossessed souls. It’s also the fact that Perry is now clean and thus free to really give his all to his musical muse.

"The other records got great response but I was a bit of a mess," he says. "Every time I got up to the next-big-thing stage, I would do self-sabotage. I had some really bad deals. I’ve been ripped-off as much as anyone who is in the music business."

Perry devours movies, and is frustrated that cutting edge films such as Being John Malkovich constantly push the public’s boundaries, but that such "rip-off" artists as Ryan Adams are the ones making it big in music. Thus with All Children he says, "I want people making records like people make movies. I spent my very last cent making this record, and past that, I spent other people’s last cent. I want other people to take those risks and make bold music.

"I wanted to make something that I really wanted to make, get rid of anyone who’s in the middle and make people love me or hate me with this record."