For the first time in 25 years, Linda Perry returns to the record, with her first solo album since 1999’s After Hours. This is Let It Die Here — a treatise on liberation and trauma that reclaims personal, artistic identity; something Linda began to recognize was slipping through her grasp, after decades of pouring herself into the dozens of projects to which she dedicated her multifaceted array of talents and capabilities, none of which were her own; not the way this album is such an unadulterated extension of Linda.
The making of the documentary of the same name may have been the impetus for writing and recording this album, but the true journey began long before After Hours, In Flight, “Beautiful,” Deep Dark Robot, 4 Non Blondes, or the early days of playing in San Francisco. Understanding this album and everything it represents for the past, present, and all potential futures of Linda Perry means going all the way back to her first encounters with what she’d eventually come to understand as “it,” and why it needed to die to set her free.
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- Scenes: Empathy at the Sonic Edges
- Becoming: The Way Out is Through
- Unveiling: Learning to Be Your Own Beholder
- Albatross: You Can
NotOvercome - Linda Perry’s Let It Die Here Studio Gear
- Stream Linda Perry’s Let It Die Here
Hero image photo credit: Chuck Saftler
Scenes: Empathy at the Sonic Edges
Across 17 tracks, Let It Die Here is an odyssey of existential introspection that challenges the present through the lens of Linda’s past, to seize her own future and untether herself from the weights of personal trauma, the modern realities of life in the arts, matrilineal strife — weights that, ironically, were as essential to her catalog as they are to now discard.
This catalog goes beyond the works under Linda’s or 4 Non Blondes’ names. Her extensive, diverse oeuvre includes writing, producing, and recording for the likes of Christina Aguilera, Dolly Parton, Adele, Gwen Stefani, Weezer, Ariana Grande, Fischerspooner, Courtney Love, Joan Jett, and Unwritten Law, to name just a few.
The initial question felt obvious: with so many credits spanning 2-plus decades of numerous styles, instruments, and cultural shifts, how does that affect what Linda brings into writing and recording this new album? How does one collect the sheer mass of it all and build this LP? The answer surprised me.
In a fashion befitting only Linda, she’s blunt: “it doesn’t.” Linda continues,
“I think that was the whole point. I had gotten lost in the other people and wasn’t capable of understanding my own emotions. Working with other people is great but, at the same time, there is sacrifice.
“I like to dig deep with people, and I’m not looking to make hits. I just want to make music. I want to create and I want it to be authentic; I want it to be emotional. People make fun of me for that but I’m not looking for a hit. I’m just looking for a real moment to capture in time.”
Linda’s passion pours out of her, from her own craft to those around her, as a force so inevitable that it regularly placed her at the epicenter of major inflection points in multiple women’s careers. With Pink, Linda co-wrote most of the former’s smash-success second album, Mizzundastood, including fully writing both “Lonely Girl” and “Get the Party Started.”
The next year, Christina Aguilera would release “Beautiful” — a worldwide chart-topper that catapulted Aguilera to bona fide pop stardom, written by Linda. And shortly after that, Courtney Love debuted her first single as a solo artist, following the dissolution of Hole, “Mono,” with Linda Perry co-authoring the song.
Becoming: The Way Out is Through
The magnetism and compassion of Linda’s artistry is astoundingly empathetic, and to be so instinctively capable of finding and bringing out these moments in others is the conceptual inversion of Let It Die Here. Where she previously had grown accustomed to getting lost in others, this album asks, explores, and answers Linda’s foundational question: “why do I need someone else to say what I feel?”
Put another way: this collision of artistry and empathy makes Linda an unmatched collaborator, and her penchant for pulling out of others their most-vulnerable moments and raw emotion are key. All these elements and attributes are who Linda is, but in being such an inextricable extension of herself, pointing it all at so many others left nothing in the place she expected to find something, when pointing back at herself.
While Linda’s Let It Die Here documentary preceded the record, it was the experience of filming and scoring for the former that made creating the album more than just a new possibility — it was necessary.
“I’m a tough guy,” Linda says, “but in this tough guy is a very vulnerable person, and there’s something really amazing about letting it all out and just being so embarrassingly honest. I don’t know, something about it gives me hope and strength and courage.”
Perseverance through vulnerability; “the only way out is through,” to borrow from Robert Frost (and Trent Reznor; IYKYK). In the midst of this vulnerability, Linda finds a source of strength and optimism that underpins everything she pursues, to the extent that there’s almost no separation between herself, the people, the projects, and the sound of her craft coming to life. And yet at the nexus of soul-bearing exposure and the material execution of her musical instincts, what Linda finds is what becomes “The Suitcase.”
Questions of identity collide with an existential probing of Linda’s presence in the world; questions around growing, evolving, and expanding, demanding to account for how she’ll thrive as an artist, mother, creator, producer — her (relationship with her) mother is at the heart of it all.
“There’s all this stuff and it’s all geared toward my mother; the whole album is about my mom, and the trauma and luggage carried that wasn’t mine. All these years, I never once thought about opening the suitcase, pulling out all her s**t, and filling it up with mine.
“Do I want the suitcase? I do want the suitcase. I want that beautiful, worn-in leather bag that reminds me of her, but I don’t want all the bulls**t inside.”
For Linda, the lesson isn’t about the proverbial baggage of matrilineal trauma, unto itself. It’s about letting go, and about accepting that longing for heartfelt relationships doesn’t intrinsically require burdening yourself with the weight of everything that came before you. It’s valid to want, and to learn from, a warmth that wasn’t there.
You aren’t beholden to the “junk” aspects of those childhood experiences; you don’t have to carry them. And with Let It Die Here, every track, sound, lyric, and idea is a self-reinforcing spiritual imposition to foster freedom and individual identity — something that the looming shadow of parental expectations can only risk pushing further from your grasp. To truly own your selfhood is to be willing to shed every ounce of expectation that compromises who you are.
And with the vortex of this all, there’s “Beautiful” — Linda’s version.
Unveiling: Learning to Be Your Own Beholder
As a song made internationally famous by Christina Aguilera, “Beautiful” is a masterclass on self-actualizing autonomy; on staking one’s own vulnerability on the weight of expectations, only to do what’s right for you, discarding the nebulous constellation of social forces that dictate how we think we ‘ought’ to move through the world. Whether out of laziness or bad faith, it’s easy for some to take the message for granted. After all, does anyone really believe — or want to admit — that relinquishing the reins of one’s own happiness to the uncaring whims of other people or forces is preferred, much less desirable?
What’s most striking, and arguably the fact that puts the full, philosophical heft of Let It Die Here ceaselessly into focus, is learning that “Beautiful” was actually the last song to be recorded. The temptation was to think that, amidst all her collaborations and projects, to reclaim one of her most-commercially successful pieces of songwriting would be the logical first step, on a record about healing the rediscovered self and finding the strength to accept that the little version of yourself — the one with whom these foundational layers of trauma were forged — is you.
The reality is that Linda Perry came close to never even considering touching “Beautiful,” much less arranging and recording her own version of it. And while Linda’s version is as sonically gorgeous as it is socially necessary, amidst today’s cultural landscape, it would be a disservice to Let It Die Here to put so much on this single track, being the one that longstanding and new listeners would recognize.
This time, “Beautiful” is a small fractal of the kaleidoscopic emotional, artistic, introspective, and expressive palette of the album. Tracks such as “Mourning,” “Anxiety,” and “Liberation” are transitory reprieves, behaving as an interstitial psychopomp to guide the listener through cerebral, liminal domains of connective psychological tissue.
“Sunday Best” and the album’s closer “Albatross” bookend the penultimate “Liberation,” and the themes of flight, weight, drowning, freedom, malleability, and despair that have colored the first 16 tracks suddenly unveil an additional dimension of rawness, when the more-common flight-freedom metaphor of final song’s namesake is doing more to acknowledge the seemingly inescapable guilt and dread that comes with the phrase, “an albatross around the neck.”
“That’s the through-line: I’m just trying to break free of this f****ng thing that this person had over me for all these years; a thing I didn’t ask for.
“I’m so grateful that I got to learn so much. I learned how to be a survivor. I learned how to be strong. Through my mom’s bad parenting, I learned what a good parent should look like.”
Albatross: You Can Not Overcome
Despite the gravitas of the matrilineal trauma Linda explores on the record, her discussion of it is exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s endured, learned, and grown, in the ways Linda describes. She laughs, she’s evocative, and she’s unwaveringly precise about two things.
First, there wasn’t much “pre-thinking” with this record, as Linda articulates it. The music came to her, and to write, record, and produce it all was an unstoppable result of who she is. It’s why Let It Die Here is teeming with variety, from the genre motifs spanning southern rock, folk, and pop-tinged melancholy to the rawness of its overarching sound design and deluge of diverse, multi-instrumental arrangements. In fact, she was adamant with producer and engineer Dave Way, telling him, “Don’t you dare try to fix anything…let it be what it is.”
Second, is that the personal, existentially reflective nature of Let It Die Here is only one facet of the record’s raison d’être. It’s therapeutic, and it naturally explores and unpacks countless themes and ideas that will resonate with many, no matter where you might align on the spectrums of sexuality or gender, but Let It Die Here is aiming for something bigger than freeing oneself, even if the essential undercurrent is that you must start with you. The larger target is to revolutionize how we engage with ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities via music; the responsibility of artists to be proactive, not reactive.
If there’s one major thing Linda wants listeners of Let It Die Here to grasp, it’s that vulnerability and embracing fear of the unknown is how we find new, powerful ways to connect with ourselves and those around us. And for musicians, it’s abandoning the safety and comfort of what you’re told ‘works’, instead grabbing onto the wild horse and letting things run however they run.
Do the weird stuff. Abandon the click. Bring bottle caps and theremins alongside vintage guitars and wild drum samplers into the studio. “Don’t think about it being a hit,” Linda requests. “Don’t think about what everybody else is doing. Just do the record you want to do and go…let it be faster than you.”
Fear, inhibition, self-consciousness, weights of expectation, the contents of your suitcase — these things, and so many more, are the “its” at stake. So, let them die here.
Linda Perry’s Let It Die Here Studio Gear
Working with Grammy Award-winning producer, writer, engineer, and mixer Dave Way on Let It Die Here, Linda spared no effort in sonic exploration, weaving numerous styles and instrumental arrangements into a voltaic, versatile tapestry of tracks. Here’s a firsthand look into the gear behind Let It Die Here.
With drums, Linda’s no strange to experimentation, having been an early adopter of and advocate for the legendary Akai MPC. For this album, variety was both inevitable and essential. She describes her process: “I change drum sounds per song, it’s so annoying, like, I’m trying to find the perfect drum sound!”
The pursuit of self-described perfection meant the mics were as important as the instruments. Kicks were captured with a FET U 47 and a vintage D12, as well as a few surprise mics, when she wasn’t using an 85 or an 87. Front and center, AEA 44s, KU4s, and R88 ribbon microphones were critical, while the iconic AKG C12, Neumann M 49, and Telefunken ELA M 270 mics handled the room recording duties.
Instrumentally speaking, a menagerie of vibraphones, marimbas, tubular bells, theremin, bottle caps, string arrangements, horns, a celesta, and an antique piano give the album its lush, out-of-time characteristics. Linda’s classic Gibson ES-335 returned, joined by a vintage ‘60s-era Fender Jaguar and Telecaster, alongside Taylor and Gibson acoustic guitars.
Mics for bass and guitar parts ran the gamut of an 87, an Electro-Voice RE20, a 57, a variety of Royer FETs, and a Neumann KM 56, played through vintage ‘60s Fender Deluxe and Vox amplifiers.
On the studio side, it’s a truly unrivaled array of historic gear: a Fairchild 670 limiter/compressor, a Teletronix LA-2A, a Neve 1073 microphone preamp, and a Neve 1053 mic preamp/3-band EQ, all running through an API 1604 console.
“Everything went into this record. I explored it all; I had to make room for it.”
Stream Linda Perry’s Let It Die Here
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