“I’m such a weirdo, anxiety-ridden, stressed-out control freak. I don’t know how to have fun, so I’m doing my best,” Linda Perry told the crowd at a sold-out Roxy Theatre last December.
It was a surprising confession. Minutes earlier, the charismatic frontwoman of 4 Non Blondes had been laughing and smiling with her bandmates, performing new material and a pair of favorites including their 1993 hit “What’s Up?”
The group’s reunion, more than three decades in the making, coincides with a new chapter for Perry: her first solo effort since 1996, the self-produced album “Let It Die Here,” and a documentary, “Linda Perry: Let It Die Here.”
Today, Perry sits in the control room of her Sherman Oaks recording studio, an eclectic blend of rock and roll and zen. A console features a Daruma doll, a miniature vintage sports car and a tiny replica of Perry holding her child, Rhodes. The main space is filled with musical instruments, a Buddha statue, a Yoda doll, a skull, and glam platform boots perched atop a piano. Photographs of icons like David Bowie, Stevie Nicks and Mick Jagger line the walls.
Wearing one of her signature 10-gallon hats, layers of gold chains, a black Depeche Mode T-shirt, baggy faded jeans and brown suede platform boots, Perry exudes the magnetism of a rock star suited for center stage. It feels inevitable that she is stepping back into the spotlight after decades spent writing, co-writing and producing music for others and composing for film and television.
Yet Perry, 62, has never truly been in the shadows. Her portfolio spans an exceptional range of some of the biggest names in music — from Christina Aguilera, Dolly Parton and Pink to Ringo Starr, Alicia Keys and Gwen Stefani. She’s written hit songs, received Grammy and Golden Globe nominations and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015.
Even so, Perry remains her own harshest critic. Explaining her onstage remarks at the Roxy show last year, she says, “It’s hard to have fun, because I’m controlling and I want to be great at what I do, so I overthink. There’s a lot going on in my head while I’m up there.”
“But music is fun. It’s a release,” she continues. “It’s great when I hit that area where I can stop worrying and disappear into the craft.”
Release has become a through line for Perry, reflected in the shared title of her forthcoming projects, drawn from her song “Let It Die Here.” She wrote it while caring for her dying mother — with whom she had a fraught relationship — and reflecting on their past.
“I was thinking about how you can choose to be set free, or you can still carry all the s—: the trauma, the shame, the guilt, the anger,” Perry says. “It was my hope to just let it go, to let it die here so I can move on.”
At the time, Perry had written a couple of songs, but wasn’t planning a full-length record. However, weeks before the documentary premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, she was asked to play a set after the screening. “I was like, what the f— am I gonna perform?” she says. “So I was like, ‘OK, I’ll just write a record. … The whole album is about my mom.’”
Across 17 tracks, including several instrumentals drawn from the documentary’s score, the album unfolds almost like a rock opera, building an immersive arc. Perry reveals different facets of herself as she navigates a gauntlet of emotions, her voice shifting across songs, at times sounding like distinct characters, as she explores her relationship with her mother — and, in doing so, herself — across her life and after her death.
One of the turning points comes midway through. After “The Suitcase,” in which Perry expresses feeling stuck with the baggage left by her mother — too guilty to empty it and reluctant to let go of the comfort it offers — she finally clears it out, making space for her own life in the next track, a reimagining of “Beautiful.”
By the time Perry sings “Albatross,” the final song, all the layers have been peeled away. Distilled to vocals, guitar, bass, piano and drums as Perry sheds a lifetime of weight, the song ends on a single, resonant power chord — a sonic declaration of liberation.
Fittingly, Perry chose “Beautiful” as the lead single. Originally written decades ago for a shelved comeback record, the song instead became a hit for Christina Aguilera. Perry never expected to revisit it, but did so after someone suggested it. A full-circle moment, it was the final track recorded for the album that now reintroduces her to the public.
The documentary casts a wider net. Early in the film, Perry sits behind the wheel of her car, adjusts the rearview mirror and backs out of the garage. The camera lingers on a boombox on a shelf as she sets out on a contemplative drive. The sequence frames what follows: a portrait of a determined woman who has steered her own course and found extraordinary success in music, now taking stock of her life, grappling with feeling like both a “failure and the best success story,” and confronting the childhood wounds that achievement could not heal.
Like the record, the documentary was unplanned. When director Don Hardy asked to start filming Perry, she assumed it would amount to social media content. Instead, it evolved into a feature-length documentary tracing her abusive upbringing, teenage drug addiction and suicide attempt, success with 4 Non Blondes, pivot to producing, songwriting process, artistic collaborations and breast cancer.
Also featured is Rhodes, now 11, whom Perry shares with ex-wife Sara Gilbert, who appears in the film as well; along with Aguilera, Parton and Brandi Carlile, among others.
Hailed by Rolling Stone as “the rawest, most revealing music documentary in years,” the film is so unflinching that Perry remained backstage while it played at Tribeca. “I couldn’t bear watching it because it was too overwhelming,” she says. Even while scoring it, she kept the sound off.
In a particularly visceral scene, Perry bursts into tears while dancing to Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home.” Her voice cracks as she remembers being a fearless child who would dance with abandon, before she grew cautious with age.
Suddenly motionless, she faces the camera with her hands over her eyes. “I lost myself,” she says, before picking the dance back up and periodically stopping throughout.
As she spirals, she weeps, tracing that fearlessness to childhood, when, she says, she was indifferent to whether she lived or died and behaved recklessly in search of escape, feeling as if she had nothing to lose. As the song ends, through tears she says, “I’m a terrible, terrible dancer. But I used to not care.”
“That scene is the most embarrassing thing. I look crazy and emotional,” Perry says. “I have no idea what happened. But something about that song triggered me. It came out of nowhere.”
After recording the moment on her phone, Perry sent the footage to Hardy and then deleted it without watching it. Had she hesitated, she notes, she might have talked herself out of sharing it. “I think it’s a human thing to not want something like that to go out into the world. But I knew it was important and that I had to get it to him because I was going to erase it,” she recalls. “So I was like, ‘F— it. Here.’”
It was one step toward reclaiming her fearlessness, however complicated its origins.
Growing up, Perry was caught between two extremes. Her father, an engineer, was an alcoholic who made her feel invisible. Recognizing she would never win his approval, she eventually stopped seeking it.
By contrast, Perry’s relationship with her fiery mother was defining. “My journey is with her. She was my abuser,” she says, explaining why even a negative connection felt preferable to none at all. “At least her disapproval made me feel secure and safe because she was connecting to me in some way where my dad did not. It was like, ‘OK, at least she sees me.’”
Yet that visibility came at a harrowing cost. Perry recalls playing with the family dog as a child while it barked. For reasons she still does not understand, her mother disapproved, doling out a swift and humiliating punishment. “You want to be a dog? OK, be a dog,” her mother told her, before stripping Perry naked, fastening a collar around her neck and forcing her into the doghouse.
“My mom did stuff like that all the time,” Perry says.
There was physical violence as well — whippings, beatings, even bricks thrown. Perry and her siblings eventually figured out that if they refused to cry while being hit, their mother would stop. But she shifted to other forms of control, randomly confiscating their car keys or throwing them out of the house without warning.
Despite it all, Perry speaks of her mother with striking compassion. “I love my mom. She was great in a lot of ways, but she was just a bad mom,” Perry says. “She was mean, but I don’t think she set out to be this monster. She wasn’t a monster. She was just a very hardcore Brazilian woman who lived a very f— up life herself. Those were the tools given to her, so she passed on the same s—. I never found her at fault.”
Perry says her mother was also a fierce, if deeply flawed, protector, who was forced to become the sole provider as Perry’s father squandered his earnings. When Perry’s parents divorced, her mother, too arrogant to sustain a conventional job, resorted to other ways to keep the family afloat. “She was a con artist. She was conning the government, and men,” Perry says. “But she was doing all this stuff to make sure that we had money and we were taken care of — that we had food, clothes and somewhere to live.”
Years later, Perry took on that role in return. She bought her mother a house, supported her financially and took her into her own home as she was dying.
Perry’s tangled love for her mother finds full expression in the film’s final act, in which she assembles musicians and backing vocalists to flesh out “What Lies With You,” written after her mother’s death. In hospice, Perry shares, she held her mother close, told her she loved her and reassured her not to worry. It was the first time they had ever truly held each other like that.
In her final months, Perry says, her mother became the parent she had always wanted, dying peacefully after Perry saw what she describes as a flash of light in her mother’s eyes. “I saw heaven falling from her eyes, like a long last look before you say goodbye,” she sings in the chorus.
After an emotional delivery of the song, Perry is overcome. With her handwritten lyrics on a stand before her, she drops her head and exhales heavily as she cries. It was not the song she expected to write, she says. She thought anger would surface. Instead came sadness, pain and empathy for the mother she still deeply loves.
“That’s one of my favorite moments in the documentary because that emotion — everything you feel coming off that screen — is real,” she says.
Just as Perry alchemizes suffering into melody, she often frames her hardships as “gifts,” albeit sometimes “very, very heavy gifts.”
That perspective extends even to the cancer discovered after a long‑desired breast reduction, when routine testing of the removed tissue revealed an aggressive form of the disease. Perry chose to undergo a double mastectomy. “It was a no‑brainer,” she says. “I was halfway there anyway.”
She attributes the illness to years of chronic stress in the music industry, poor sleep and workaholism. If not for the diagnosis, she believes she would have dismissed any symptoms as the toll of her mother’s decline and simply kept pushing forward, likely until it was too late.
Perry has since cut back her hours, while other shifts followed on their own. After her mother’s death, something seemed to settle internally. “I’m calmer. It’s like the reactor went away,” she says. “I feel more in control of my emotions.”
Still, Perry remains as demanding of herself as ever. Being hard on herself, she says, keeps her creative. Without that edge, she worries she would become content. “And who wants to be that?” she says. “I think it’s my job to constantly try to be better.”
As to who Perry is without the pain that shaped so much of her life, a question she poses in a lyric on her new record, she pauses. “I think I’m still figuring that out,” she says. “It’s still all very fresh for me, and I’m discovering that it’s still very raw.”
That uncertainty carries into the album’s release. Perry wants it to succeed, to be critically acclaimed, and to make an impact, but she is trying to let it all go. “If I don’t get the feedback that I want, it doesn’t make it less of an album,” she says. “I have to know that I f— stand behind it and that I love what I’m putting out there — and I do.”
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