Perfume Genius and the Tenderness Protocol

Perfume Genius — Mike Hadreas — makes records about bodies, survival, and tenderness. The remarkable thing isn’t that the music is gentle; it’s that the gentleness holds. His songs don’t flinch, don’t rush, don’t apologise for their softness. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is a record that treats tenderness as a kind of strength.

I think softness is infrastructure. We just refuse to admit it.

The strength of soft things

We’re trained to think of strength as hardness — walls, deadlines, “no exceptions” policies. But the things that actually hold us together are soft: trust, patience, the willingness to say “I don’t know yet.” Hadreas’s music is proof that softness can carry enormous weight. The quietest songs on his records are often the ones that survive you.

The protocol

I’ve started writing what I privately call tenderness protocols into my projects. They’re not features; they’re commitments:

• The empty state — write the message a person actually needs to read, not “No data found.”
• The error page — say what broke, what’s safe, and what to do next, in human language.
• The deprecation notice — give people time, and a path, and an apology.
• The default — when in doubt, choose the option that causes the least shame.

None of this shows up in a benchmark. All of it shows up in how a person feels at 11pm when something they rely on is broken.

The song that breaks it open

Slip Away is the one I can’t listen to casually. It’s a song about love that refuses to be hidden — the chorus arrives like weather, like a door finally opening. Every time, I stop whatever I’m doing. That’s the test for tenderness: it doesn’t demand attention, it commands it, because it’s rare and it’s true.

I want my software to have one moment like that — one place where a user, in the middle of their day, stops and feels that someone cared about the details. One chorus. That’s the whole ambition.