Linda Perry

• 1. Introduction

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  Linda Perry spent her early twenties in a small, windowless room in San Francisco. She carried her guitar out onto the city streets and sang songs she had written herself. Nobody walking past could have guessed whose voices would one day carry that material. Her name would later appear in the credits of records by some of the most recognizable women in pop. Most listeners never noticed it. How does a street singer become the person that pop stars phone when they need a song? And why would a writer step away from the biggest moment of her own singing career? The answers run through lesbian bars, recording studios, a reality show, and several reinventions.

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• 2. Streets and Coffeehouses

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  Linda Perry was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on the 15th of April 1965, into a house full of art and music. Her father, Alfred Xavier Perry, was a musician and engineer of Portuguese descent. Her mother, Marluce Martins Perry, was a model and designer of Brazilian descent. Music pulled at her from an early age.

  She spent her teenage years in San Diego. In 1986, at the age of 21, she moved north to San Francisco.

  Once there, she played solo at clubs and coffeehouses around the Bay Area. Her stops included Nightbreak, Paradise Lounge, DNA Lounge, and The Kennel Club.

  Stephan Jenkins, who later fronted Third Eye Blind, was also a musician in San Francisco at the time. He has recalled sitting in a room with Perry while the two traded original compositions. Perry herself denies that the meeting ever happened.

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• 3. What's Up, Remade

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  In the middle of 1989, a band founder named Christa Hillhouse recruited Perry into 4 Non Blondes. Perry arrived with a song called "Down on Your Face", the first she had composed as a professional.

  The band built its reputation in San Francisco bars, especially lesbian bars. That scene gave the group a significant lesbian following. In July 1991, Interscope Records signed them.

  The band recorded its only album, Bigger, Better, Faster, More!, in 1992. It included "What's Up?", a song Perry wrote. The album's producer insisted on a reworked arrangement, and Perry was unhappy with it. She and the band recorded the song again, modeled on her original demo. Her version became the one on the album.

  In March 1993, "What's Up" came out as the album's second single. It reached number one in 10 countries and pulled the whole record along behind it. The album spent 59 weeks on the Billboard 200. Between 1992 and 1994 it sold 1.5 million copies, a run the band never repeated.

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• 4. After the Band

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  Late in 1994, while 4 Non Blondes were recording a second album, the group broke up. Perry pointed to her dissatisfaction with the first album and to continuing creative clashes with the band. She has also said her sexuality played a part in the tension.

  That same year, at the Billboard Music Awards, she performed with the band while a slang word, "dyke", was displayed on her guitar. In 1995 she told a journalist from The Advocate: "All my life I've loved women, and that's it. I've never been any other way."

  Interscope kept her on as a solo artist and assembled a production team for her debut. It included Kevin Gilbert, Bill Bottrell, and members of the Tuesday Night Music Club, who had recently produced Sheryl Crow's first album. In Flight came out on the 16th of September 1996. Reviews were positive, but sales were poor. The single "Fill Me Up" reached number 30 in New Zealand and number 63 in Australia.

  Perry joined the Red Fish, Blue Fish tour, which took her around the world and put her on bills supporting The Who. To promote the record, she appeared on The Howard Stern Show. There she took part in a segment called "lesbian dial-a-date" and played the one hit from her old band. She also hosted the Bay Area Music Awards, nicknamed the "Bammies", in 1997 and 1998. In 1997 she left San Francisco for Sherman Oaks, in Los Angeles.

  Her second solo album, After Hours, arrived in 1999 on Rockstar Records. This time she was the opening act for Bryan Adams.

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• 5. Teaching Herself the Machines

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  A TASCAM DA-88 recorder, a Neumann U 67 microphone, and a Fairchild 670 compressor were among the tools Perry started collecting for a home studio. She was curious about the technology behind the music she heard on the radio, so she asked a friend. On that advice she bought an Akai MPC sampler and Roland and Korg Triton synthesizers. She taught herself to use them. Her first dance song, "Get the Party Started", came out of that learning.

  She sent the song to Guy Oseary, Madonna's manager. He turned it down.

  In 2000, the pop rock singer Pink got in touch, looking for help with writing and production on her second album, Missundaztood. Perry co-wrote and produced much of it. She received full writing credits on "Lonely Girl" and on "Get the Party Started", the song Oseary had passed on. It became the album's lead single and Pink's biggest hit up to that point. The album did well with both critics and buyers around the world, and it put Perry back in the spotlight as a producer and songwriter.

  The following year she produced "Beautiful" for Christina Aguilera, another song she had written. It was also a worldwide success. In 2003 Perry won two ASCAP awards for her songwriting and earned a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year for "Beautiful". The recording itself took Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 46th Annual Grammy Awards.

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• 6. A Widening Circle

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  The art-dance duo Fischerspooner brought Perry in for a few songs on their second album. She also took co-writing credits on Gwen Stefani's solo debut, Love. Angel. Music. Baby., including its first single, "What You Waiting For?" That album later earned a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year.

  Custard Records, a label of her own distributed through Atlantic, launched to promote two new acts, Sunshine and James Blunt. For Blunt's song "No Bravery", Perry produced and played guitar. She also co-wrote "Save Me" for the southern California punk rock band Unwritten Law.

  In 2005 she re-released In Flight. That year she also began work on Aguilera's third studio album, Back to Basics, released in 2006. Perry co-wrote every song on its second disc with Aguilera. In late 2006 and early 2007 she added production and songwriting to Vanessa Carlton's third album, Heroes and Thieves. The San Francisco chapter of the Recording Academy honored her with an award for her contribution to music.

  In 2008 Perry signed the group Little Fish and began producing its album, Baffled and Beat, which appeared in August 2010. She also worked with Daniel Powter on his third album, Under the Radar. Adam Lambert's debut, For Your Entertainment, released in 2009, carried her song "A Loaded Smile". Aguilera's sixth album, Bionic, followed in 2010 with "Lift Me Up", a song Perry wrote and produced entirely on her own.

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• 7. Deep Dark Robot and Phone Recordings

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  In June 2010, Perry told her Facebook and Twitter followers that she was "going to make an album" with a new band, Deep Dark Robot. She founded it with Tony Tornay. The name came from an ad-libbed lyric, "deep dark robot falling in love", and she kept it for her next musical project.

  On the 5th of November 2010, she played live in San Francisco at TwentyFifty, a venue formerly called CELLSpace. The evening celebrated the release of an album by Roger Rocha, the 4 Non Blondes guitarist, and his band The Golden Hearts. Perry performed a solo set of covers, including Radiohead's "Creep" and Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun". She and Rocha shared one song, Led Zeppelin's "Since I've Been Loving You".

  Deep Dark Robot released its album, 8 Songs About a Girl, in March 2011 and began touring. The single "Won't You Be My Girl?" promoted it.

  In July 2011, Perry began posting acoustic covers recorded on her iPhone. They included "Mad World" by Tears for Fears and "Just What I Needed" by the Cars. She wrote on Facebook: "iPhone sessions are me sitting at my piano an recording song into iPhone voice memo. Then I post it. Very simple enjoy :)"

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• 8. Screens, a Label, and a Marriage

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  VH1 aired Make or Break: The Linda Perry Project in 2014, a reality series in which she worked with up-and-coming musicians. The acts included VanJess and the winner, Hemming.

  A year later, Adele's album 25 carried a song Perry co-wrote with her, "Can't Let Go". It appeared as a bonus track on the Target and Japanese editions. Perry played piano, produced, and engineered it. She also wrote "Hands of Love", the theme song for the film Freeheld, performed by Miley Cyrus. In June 2015, a ceremony in New York inducted her into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

  Her private life ran alongside this work. Perry was in a relationship with the actress Clementine Ford from 2009 to 2010. In 2011 she began a relationship with the actress Sara Gilbert. They announced their engagement in April 2013 and married on the 30th of March 2014. Gilbert gave birth to their son on the 28th of February 2015. Perry also became stepmother to Gilbert's son and daughter from an earlier relationship with the television producer Ali Adler. In December 2019, Gilbert filed for legal separation.

  In 2018, Perry teamed with Dolly Parton to write "Girl In The Movies" for the Netflix film Dumplin'. The song earned a Golden Globe nomination.

  Kerry Brown became her partner in 2017 in launching We Are Hear, a record label, music publisher, and artist management company in Los Angeles. Natasha Bedingfield, Imogen Heap, Dorothy, and Willa Amai are among the artists it has signed. In 2018, Perry helped curate the One Love Malibu festival, which raised $1 million in relief funds after the Woolsey Fire. In 2020 came the fundraiser Heaven Is Rock & Roll for The Art of Elysium. Dave Grohl, Pat Smear, and Krist Novoselic, the surviving members of Nirvana, performed alongside Beck and St. Vincent. Cheap Trick, L7, and Marilyn Manson also played.

  That same year, Perry co-wrote "A Beautiful Noise" with seven other women: Alicia Keys, Brandi Carlile, Brandy Clark, Hillary Lindsey, Lori McKenna, Hailey Whitters, and Ruby Amanfu. Keys and Carlile performed it to encourage Americans to vote in the 2020 Presidential Election. It earned a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year in 2021.

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