Kimberly Perry on Arriving at First Solo Project: 'It's No Secret That There Were Highs and Lows' (Exclusive)

The Band Perry alum's EP 'Bloom' is available Friday

Kimberly Perry is flourishing.

The mom-to-be recently released "If I Die Young Pt. 2," a reimagined version of her 2010 hit with The Band Perry, and now, she’s celebrating the release of her first solo project, Bloom, available Friday.

“The title really came from a line in 'If I Die Young Pt. 2,' the first line in the pre-chorus; it said, 'I've had time to bloom.' I love one-word album titles because I think they're really profound," she shares exclusively with PEOPLE. "For me, the word emanates a lot. And these first five tracks on the EP, they talk a lot about creating the space to be able to grow and to blossom,”

The Band Perry alum, 39, decidedly leaned into this next chapter of life — even her “body is in bloom,” she notes.

“Sometimes, at least in my experience, that can be a violent process emotionally to create the space for things to be added to your life and for blessings to develop," she explains. "It's no secret that over the past handful of years, there's definitely been hits and misses in my career, there were highs and lows. I had gone through a broken first marriage."

Perry was married to former MLB player J.P. Arencibia for four years before the pair split in 2018.

“There was a lot of wisdom that I needed to collect and just a lot that I needed to really use the metaphor to weed out of the flower bed of my life to be able to blossom into the things that I was hoping for," Perry says now. "And these songs really speak to, especially in this first half, creating the space for that.”

The ups and downs for Perry, however, are all part of the process, and she's able to see the good in the journey as a whole.

"In the lows and the misses, you gain your wisdom, and in the highs you're gaining your taste for the beauty. And we keep chasing that over and over," she says. "I I just hope that these songs that have been so highly personal to me and reflect real time and real life experiences can be used to help hold hands with somebody who needs them in the moment that they find them.”

Perry also plans to release a second half of the project later this year — one she’s writing in “real time"— but for all of the beauty and ease she's found, Perry admits writing "If I Die Young Pt. 2" was still challenging.

“The hardest part was thinking about all the things that it did not need to be. I wrote the first version by myself when I was in east Tennessee in my bedroom, in my early 20s, before any of this wild journey in country music had happened,” she explains. “And I really loved and wanted to maintain, just from a creative standpoint, some of the language. But it was also important to me that we didn't rob anybody of their original experience or the validation that they got, because it meant so much to so many people.”

For Perry, the pandemic served as the catalyst she needed to take a step back and re-evaluate her life, and her brothers (and bandmates) did the same.

“We got a moment for the first time since I was 15, Reid was 10, and Neil was 8 to kind of be in our own space, write by ourselves, and really think about, 'Hey, have we gotten everything out of life that we want? We've worked so hard since we were kids,'" she recalls.

Related: The Band Perry Announces Hiatus and Says Members Will Focus on 'Individual Creative Pursuits'

"It was important to me to really build a family and be in pursuit of that and build my home and move to Nashville. We lived in Houston — I had never gone to really fulfill my childhood dream at that point of living in the 615. And so we also decided creatively, we felt the same way,” she says of the band's collective decision to part.

Still, the leap to embrace a career as a solo artist weighed on Perry, who says she feels “a responsibility as the oldest sibling in the family to take care of everybody for forever and not sort of disrupt the flow of business.”

For years prior, she’d simply been used to being part of a group and taking those responsibilities as they came.

“I, as a songwriter, have always really had to consider two other male voices in the band. There were moments we would literally go, ‘Can I sing the words, “I just want to be the only girl you love all your life?”’ because they're boys. And how do you represent everybody?” she explains.

Of being able to focus on just one narrative (her own) now, Perry says: “It was just such a freeing thing to be able to think in a highly feminine way and think in almost a more transparent and vulnerable way, because it was just my voice and my experiences that I was creating songs about.”

And, she says, the family is doing as well as ever.

“I'm just really excited. Reid is engaged, he's about to be married; Neil's engaged. And it's just cool to see everybody's life develop. We toured so hard since we were kids and there were just some things left on the table of life that we wanted to get for ourselves, and I'm just really so proud for them that they're getting to do that as well.”

While Perry and husband Johnny Costello, whom she married in 2021, prepare for the arrival of baby Whittaker James in August, she remains focused on what she calls her Bloom redemption story.

Related: Pregnant Kimberly Perry Reveals Name of Her Baby Boy on the Way, Shares Hopes for 'Whimsical' Son

“There's a lot of grace that's been given to me to be able to come back and enter into this country music family," Perry tells PEOPLE. "It definitely reminds me of just this human experience; that it really doesn't matter where we start, what matters is where we finish."

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Read the original article on People.