Linda Perry has spent most of her career behind the curtain — and she’s built an empire there. She wrote “Beautiful” and handed it to Christina Aguilera. She has worked with Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keys, Miley Cyrus, Adele — one hit after another, almost none of them credited to her voice. And as she revealed to me recently, some of her best-known work for other artists came out of simply watching them: She wrote “Lonely Girl” for Pink while Pink was asleep on the studio floor a few feet away, and played it back to her when she woke up. All of it was, by her own account, a kind of hiding. A good one, even a fun one. But she was hiding all the same.
That ends this year, on three fronts at once. In May, Perry, 61, released her first solo album in over two decades, “Let It Die Here,” alongside a documentary of the same name that started, she says, as nothing more than a friend filming her songwriting process — until the footage caught something else entirely. Meanwhile, she reteamed with 4 Non Blondes, the band she left in her 20s, to put out a new record, their first in nearly three decades. And this fall, she’ll tour with the Indigo Girls, a pairing of two queer-artist catalogs with very different relationships to visibility.
Perry doesn’t perform false modesty about any of it. She’s a rockstar, confident enough to say so outright. But she’s also a woman who, by her own description, watched her own documentary like a horror movie — and who found that writing for herself was harder than writing for anyone else. What follows is a conversation about what happens when the person who spent 30 years observing everyone else finally turns the lens around.
Does this era of your career feel like a creative chapter unfolding across different mediums or three separate lives kind of colliding at once?
Well, I’m a pretty creative person. I’m constantly working or moving. I’m not saying I’m great at what I do. I’m just always creating. So I feel like I’m in a really awesome flow. The confidence, the emotional and mental instability, in a weird way, is making things stable. It’s kind of like a weird chain of events that’s happening that’s just aligning. And I’m not going to lie: It’s like, oh, there are some people out there that support what I’ve been doing this whole time. Because you get so in your own world and you don’t even think anybody’s watching or listening.
For much of your career, you were creating behind the scenes. What’s it been like to step outside of someone else’s recording booth?
It’s quite different, obviously, because I’ve been able to kind of hide behind other artists in a sense, helping them with their vision and being the person behind it.
“Hide” seems like a packed word.
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Yeah, of course it is, but we won’t dive into that right now. Go watch the movie. But I’ll say this: I loved being in 4 Non Blondes. I love attention. I’m a natural front person. I know that. I have that in me. I’m a rockstar. I got that. I’m very confident to be able to say that. But I have a very, very sensitive heart and I’m extremely passionate. And when I left 4 Non Blondes, I did it because I needed to go experience more. I didn’t feel like I was ready to commit to that and that I needed to go look at other things and understand who I was as an artist, as a human being.
I was in my 20s when I made a beautiful record called “In Flight” [released in 1996] and my label shelved it because it wasn’t 4 Non Blondes. They were trying to prove a point to me, and so it didn’t get out there in the world. I was devastated and so overwhelmed and I felt everybody hated me. So I pulled myself out of the situation and asked, “OK, how else can I be in this business? I don’t want to be a target. I just want to make music, man.” And “songwriter-producer” fell organically in place.
So hiding, yeah, sure. But it was super fun because I’ve worked with so many incredible artists. Making that record with Pink changed my life. It was one thing after the next that helped me become stronger and better at my craft. And so it only made sense that the next venture for me to do is get back on the bicycle, put myself back out there and go do it again. And this time I control the narrative. I don’t have a label sitting there telling me if I’m good enough or not.
Your video for “Beautiful” is so sensitive and emotional, a kind of reclamation of a narrative that was sung by someone else. What did revisiting that song reveal to you about yourself?
Christina did an incredible job on that song. I was impressed that she heard it because it was such a different song [compared] to anything that she was doing. I was a little shocked, like, “How does a girl [who did] ‘Genie in a Bottle’ hear this song for what it is?” And she did and she owned it and she nailed it. And for that, I have always had so much respect for her. In no way am I reclaiming this to make it better or to go, “Now people can hear it the right way.” She did it the right way. And now I’m just doing it the only way I know how, and that’s the Linda way. So “reclaim” wouldn’t be the word I would use. I’m just covering a really great song and I happened to have written it.
You mentioned Pink’s 2001 release “Missundaztood,” a seminal album for me as a queer teenager, especially “Lonely Girl.” Looking back on that record, do you see why queer listeners embraced it the way that they did?
Well, one, Alecia [Moore, Pink’s real name] is so open to everything. That girl welcomes everybody and everything. Such an incredibly empowering person out there fighting the good fight. She’s always been like that. So I think that people are relating to her as a person, as an individual and as an artist that is not afraid to speak for others. So I would say, first and foremost, that’s why the LGBTQ+ community embraces her and continues to. She’s just a really great artist for the queer community because she’s just out there being her and we’re just being who we are, and there’s a lot of artists that are not. People can tell the difference.
The second part of that is she had me working with her and I have a different point of view. It’s not because I’m queer; it’s just because I’m a different type of person. I’m Linda Perry. I have a very different perspective when it comes to songwriting. I’m not looking to make hits. When I write, it’s for everyone. My lyrics, my melodies, my style, it is not segregated. It is for everyone to enjoy. And I do believe that there’s a freedom on “Missundaztood” that people hear. It’s a wacky record because what was Alecia before that? She was a white girl with pink hair singing R&B music and everybody thought she was Black.
This album still feels like her actual debut.
Right? And so I think that that’s what people are responding to. There’s a certain freedom. With “Lonely Girl,” Alecia was stressed a lot. I think she knew that she was going to be one of the biggest artists in the world back then and I feel like she had a lot of stress around it because, and I’m just speculating, it was stressing her out.
So one day we were at the studio and I believe she had some stomach issues going on, like an ulcer. I’m like, “Maybe you need to chill out.” Then she fell asleep on the floor and I was just watching her like a weirdo, just kind of trying to examine, because that’s what I do. I’m trying to figure people out all the time. If you were sitting at a table by yourself, I would watch you and try to figure out what’s going on with you because I want to see: Are you confident sitting there, or are you insecure sitting there? Did someone stand you up? Are you observing? So I’m watching her and I’m staring at her and I’m just letting all these things circulate in my mind. And then I just picked up the guitar and, as she was sleeping, I wrote “Lonely Girl.” Then I recorded it right there while she was still sleeping. When she woke up, she’s like, “How long was I out?” I go, “Well, long enough for me to write a song.” And then I played her the song and she was like, “Holy shit, that’s about me.”
How do you observe differently in order to write for yourself?
There’s the issue right there: I don’t observe myself because it’s hard. You would hope that you could apply all the incredible advice and thoughts to yourself that we are constantly preaching to everybody. Isn’t it funny? With the movie, first of all, I didn’t intend to make a documentary. I want that to be clear. I thought I was just letting my friend come in and observe me in my process of songwriting and that I was going to get some kind of cool content for social media. That’s really all I thought was going on until he came to me and he was like, “I made an edit of 30 minutes of the stuff I’ve been filming.”
The documentary ended up being a gold mine of messy emotions for him because I ended up having all these things that started happening to me and one of them was a full-on breakdown because I couldn’t figure out who I was in this picture anymore. I could write a song for everybody, Chris, but I couldn’t write a song for myself. I couldn’t give myself that advice, that beautiful power that I give to other people. I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t look in the mirror and say it to myself. And so, during the last part of the documentary, I wrote this song and that basically started everything. And then after that, I wrote a whole album and it was based upon the documentary of what I saw.
As somebody who is used to observing other people, what was it like to watch yourself in the documentary?
Very scary. It’s so raw and embarrassing. This is not a fluff vanity piece about how amazing I am. It’s like, “I am fucked up and here you guys go and I’m going to invite you into this.” You know what it is? It’s everything that happens to you, but they don’t film it and they don’t put it out in a fucking theater. That’s what it is. It’s everyday emotions that we all come across, but we hide them. I got sick, my mom got sick, I had a breakdown. There’s all this shit going on. I’m like, “Holy shit, man, you thought you were just coming in to film my songwriting process and you got a fucking gold mine.”
What made you give him permission to release it?
Well, I watched it as if I were fucking watching “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” I watched through my fingers, grabbing onto my best friend’s hands, squeezing them at every moment, like, “Oh my god, I cannot believe he put that in there.” And then afterwards I just hugged him and I said, “You made a really beautiful film.” I knew it was not about me. It’s very relatable because it’s so messy and raw and emotional and honest, that’s what makes it relatable.
Chris, we’re sitting in place of “Is this real? Is this not real? Is that person’s ass really that big? Did that really happen? Did those people really die? Is that person really our president? Is this really going on?” We’re in some weird fucking morphed up, fucked up reality right now where you don’t know what is real or fake. So I said to myself, “This is the realest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Unfortunately, Linda, it’s you, but you just need to let it go.” I mean, I could have picked this thing apart to a point where there would’ve been no film.
Yeah, but you chose not to. Why?
What I did ask him to change is that he had more people in there talking about how great I am. I said, “Get rid of that.”
As you get ready to hit the road with the Indigo Girls, what kind of dialogue do you think happens when those catalogs share space?
The Indigo Girls have really paved the way for queer songwriters, artists and people in the creative space because of their incredible storytelling, their relatability and who they are. They’ve always been out and open and confident and empowering. Just using their voice for the community. I really respect that about them. I mean, they are mentors. They are, to me, role models, and in that space I have a lot to learn from them. And so I’m really looking forward to that. I have not been the best role model.
Are you just being modest?
It’s not about modesty. I feel like there’s a lot more I could have done. I’m doing more now than I did back then. And not because I was embarrassed or ashamed. I’ve been very, very clear and very out, but I have gotten mad at the community. I’ve been outspoken in other ways where I was like, why do men not let women into their clubs and why do women not let the men into their clubs? I was out and around and crazy in San Francisco and I would constantly be sitting there while I should have been partying, having fun, observing — again — the women not letting the men into the clubs and then sneaking into the men’s club with my roommate and them having a hard time with me being there, or any other girls. I never understood that about the community. Why the segregation?
Now, I don’t know what is going on now because I’m 61 and I’m not club-hopping, but I never understood why there was segregation in our own community when we were fighting such big battles already outside of our community. I never understood also, when straight people would walk down the Castro holding hands, fucking people would yell from the clubs “breeders!” But then they wanted equal rights when they walked down the Financial District.
I love the community. I support it every way I possibly can. I ran a charity called An Evening with Women for the LGBTQ+ community and I ran it for four or five years, raised over 4 or 5 million. I’ve done so much. But I have unanswered questions and those were them. And so in that sense, I really feel like, OK, maybe there’s a better way for me to approach this. And then when you talk about the Indigo Girls and us meshing together our narrative and how we have navigated through life being queer women, I’m excited to see them with their crowd, because that’s going to be their crowd. That is exciting because I feel like I’m going to learn a lot. I’ll be able to have really great discussions with them, and we will brainstorm a really incredible idea as to how to support the community.
Looking at the full arc of your career, from 4 Non Blondes to pop architect to solo artist, what do you think has been the most consistent version of you through all of that?
My honesty, for sure. Hands down. I’ve been honest from the moment I came out of that womb. I feel like I’m probably the most honest person I know. I truly believe that and I’m not saying that in an arrogant way, but I’m honest to a ridiculous fault where I can’t help it. You don’t want my fucking honesty and I’ll still give it to you. Not a blunt honest, a different kind of honesty. It’s cringey. I’m like, “Linda, why did you have to do that?” And I’m like, “Because they needed to know.” I’ll take that over them loving me for being fake. It’s funny. It’s a movie on its own.