Perkins is the son of actor Anthony Perkins and Photographer Berry Berenson. He was raised in Los Angeles, California, and New York City with his older brother, actor and Director Oz Perkins. Perkins is a great-grandson of the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who was a great-niece of Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Italian Astronomer who believed he had discovered the supposed canals of Mars, and a nephew of the Actress Marisa Berenson, Berry's sister. His paternal grandfather Osgood Perkins, was also an actor. His maternal great-grandfather was Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, a theosophist and psychic medium. His mother was a great-grandniece of art expert Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), whose sister Senda (1868–1954) was an athlete and educator and one of the first two women elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Perkins attended Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, after graduating from high school at the Harvard-Westlake School in 1994.

Some of his ancestry on his mother's side is French, Jewish, Egyptian, Italian, and Swiss. His father Anthony Perkins died in 1992 of complications related to AIDS.

"It's been a long journey, long in the coming," Perkins admits, when he discusses the album, and it took a serious detour on September 11, 2001, when his mother, a Passenger on the ill-fated American Airlines FLIGHT 11 from Boston to Los Angeles, perished in the attack on New York City's twin towers a day before the ninth anniversary of his father's death. Ash Wednesday was shaped in part by that event and its aftermath.

The band formed in Providence, Rhode Island around 2004 when Elvis moved to the East Coast upon completing Ash Wednesday, although the members have been friends and collaborators for many years.

In 2007 he did a Take-Away Show acoustic video session shot by Vincent Moon.

In 2008, Perkins in Dearland recorded a cover of the Sacred Harp song "Weeping Pilgrim" for Awake My Soul, Help Me to Sing the Soundtrack to the movie Awake My Soul.

In 2009, he worked with the Yellow Bird Project to create a T-shirt to raise money for the World Wildlife Fund. In the same year, on September 2, he performed an acoustic benefit concert in New York City at the Housing Works Bookstore Café to help promote the project's first publication.

On February 24, 2015, Perkins released his third full-length album, I Aubade, on his newly established label MIR. It is manufactured and distributed by the music division of Isolation Network, INGrooves. It will be available outside the US on April 20, 2015.