Kimberly Perry on The Band Perry’s Breakup: ‘Did We Leave or Were We Kicked Out?’
In October of 2020, The Band Perry — siblings Kimberly, Reid, and Neil — headed down to Dallas, Texas, to try and give their recording days as family trio one last shot. Unmoored during Covid lockdown and slowly finding their way back to Tennessee from their shared Sherman Oaks, California, house, they made a series of demos with Paul Cauthen’s producing team that never saw the light of day. Kimberly Perry was a fan of Cauthen’s 41 Project, especially his “Cocaine Country Dancing,” and thought the feel might suit them and their Southern gothic inclinations.
“I always thought if The Band Perry made a third record, it would have a nighttime country vibe,” Kimberly Perry says on a Thursday over tea and coffee at Nashville’s Soho House, where she is toggling between album-release logistics (her EP, Bloom, is out Friday) and baby delivery logistics (she’s seven months pregnant, due in August). “The songs we made were cool, and I had a blast doing them, but then I thought, ‘Let’s not undo our legacy. Let’s have it stay just where it is.’”
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And so The Band Perry was no more (at least for now, they’re officially on “hiatus”), gone too soon. It’s an approach that is signature Perry, if you think about it: There have been a lot of early graves in her songwriting (on their biggest hit, “If I Die Young,” and more than one on “Better Dig Two”) and a lot of thinking about the legacies we leave behind if we depart this world early. Lately she’s been pondering what it means to be reborn, though. Specifically, how some things must die so others can blossom, like a flower growing in decomposing soil or scorched forests, or a trio disbanding so a solo career — her solo career, at 39 — can begin. “Beauty from ashes,” she says. “Not beauty from beauty.”
The songs on Perry’s new EP, Bloom, are about that growth in her personal life: its rise, fall, and rise again. Or they’re about her creative life, and the tumultuous road that The Band Perry took to get here. Really, they’re about both at exactly the same time — when you grow up in a family band, there’s no dividing line. “Those two things are so intertwined for me,” she says. “I don’t know how to separate the two.” When she sings “no one tells you how to start over” on the foreboding “Burn the House Down” or “I’ll toast the girl who took my spot” on the fiddle-heavy “Cry at Your Funeral,” it feels like she’s writing equally from a broken heart and a career crossroads.
At the EP’s core is a new version of the song that made The Band Perry famous, “If I Die Young,” which she calls, simply, “If I Die Young Pt. 2.” Perry solo-wrote the “OG” in an inspired burst, and still has difficultly reflecting on how and why that sentiment came out of her — before she launched into a session to create “Pt. 2,” she sat down and talked it all through with her therapist. Written with Jimmy Robbins and Nicolle Galyon (to whose publishing house, Songs & Daughters, Perry is signed in partnership with Warner Chappell), it’s not a thematic continuation, or a glimpse into the afterlife. Instead, it finds a grown Perry revising how she once thought it might be OK to burn out rather than fade away. “I’m changing my tune since I said, if I die young,” she sings to a familiar melody. “Now I know there’s no such thing as enough time.”
Perry now —and Bloom itself — is all about this ability to change and grow, to admit our mistakes and move on, to use the lowest parts of ourselves and our stories to renew and come out the other side stronger. She’s certainly been through it, anyway. When The Band Perry’s first album came out in 2010, songs like Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me” dominated country radio, but the shift to beer-swigging party anthems caused a fork in the road that looked more like a tangle. “Our team told us, ‘You have to change to compete with bro-country,’” Perry says. “And it was so confusing for me, because that’s just not what brought us to the dance. We had to make compromises, and we got really far from the original singer-songwriter, three-part family harmonies we started with.”
To make matters more confusing, “If I Die Young” had crossover success in pop radio. What exactly where they supposed to be, they wondered? From 2015 until 2020’s last Dallas gasp, The Band Perry experimented — in some uncomfortable ways. Their first pop-leaning single, “Live Forever,” seemed at odds with a band that wrote about “the sharp knife of a short life,” a heavily electronic EP failed to resonate (a whole record was shelved), and her first marriage fell apart suddenly and unexpectedly. She describes it as a “dark chapter” in their sound, where they were trying to make everyone happy but themselves.
“I do feel like in that season I abandoned my own voice because I was just trying to take care of my mental health and my spiritual health as a woman,” Perry says. “I sang those songs, and I liked them, but I wouldn’t say it’s representative of what I’m best at.” She recently has been working to get one of them, “The Good Life,” scrapped from streaming services. Written about her ex-husband’s infidelity, she couldn’t stand by it anymore. “It was just absent of hope and sensitivity,” she said. Some things get buried, some things bloom.
She’d assumed, too, in all The Band Perry’s experimenting, that their fans would come along for the ride. “I appreciate that people were so passionate about who we were and didn’t want us to change,” she says. “But it was interesting realizing, ‘Oh, you aren’t here for the full scope of our artistry, or as humans. You’re just here for sounds that you like.’”
Perry doesn’t have regrets about it all – even though it makes her laugh when she sees how pop-leaning so much of country has become since The Band Perry first took a stab at bridging those worlds. At Stagecoach recently, she remembers seeing a male artist introduce his set by stating that he, point blank, attempts to play all genres. “I was like, ‘What?’ How crucified we were for that,” Perry says. “I have no regrets about the exploration, but I do have regrets about not grabbing the reins of our story. There were so many times I was like, did we leave, or were we kicked out?”
Not that Perry even felt at home in Nashville. Mostly on the road or at their farm in East Tennessee, the trio never quite indoctrinated themselves within the Music Row circuit. That changed when she and her new husband moved to town recently, where they intended to start a family and build a community within country music, if it was even possible. She reached out to people to write, “but I didn’t even know if they would say yes,” she says. “I didn’t know if people liked us.”
It was a cold call to Galyon that initiated their meeting, and suddenly Perry had a creative team around her, not to mention one comprising mostly women. “I’ve always been surrounded by boys and never had a such a strong female collaborator,” Perry says, who calls Galyon an “artist whisperer.” It’s also the kind of team that didn’t blink when Perry told them she was planning on having a baby and releasing music simultaneously. “I thought you had to miss one for the other,” Perry said, who married her husband Johnny Costello after a brief courtship. “I had a miscarriage, and I didn’t even know how common they were. I just knew I didn’t want to make choices anymore.” It’s an idea she sings about on “Smoke Em Too”: “I can be both at the same time. I can be yours, I can be mine.”
“Relevance” is a word that Perry uses a lot, and she’s not shy about wanting it. “I think it’s important to be humble enough to say there was a time when you were more relevant,” she says, pointing to how Lana Del Rey consistently puts out new music as a model. “I want the opportunity for that, with the wisdom I have now. And I want to do more with that relevance.”
Part of that, she hopes, is eventually expanding her reach in Nashville in a way that lets her elevate and guide artists to make Music Row a more diverse and interesting place. Perry is excited about a young sister duo out of Texas called The Lockhearts, and “would love to find a female artist who sings in Spanish,” she says. “It’s a huge part of the population that country hasn’t gotten to serve.”
Back at home, family dinners are more fun: when she gets together with her brothers, their conversations drift to babies, engagements (Neil) and weddings (Reid), not the music business. “It’s our first time considering ourselves as individuals,” Perry says.
Perry is writing now (this afternoon, it’s with Hillary Scott), and expects to have a full album done by the fall. She’s excited about where country music is heading, and how it could welcome a voice like hers into the fold, both after long last and for the first time. “It’s the best season I’ve been a part of,” she says. “The War and Treaty, carving out their space. Brittney Spencer, Carly Pearce, Lainey Wilson, Elle King blows my mind. These women are getting away with cool music and being exactly who they want to be, and they are hits. That’s the dream.”
It’s exactly why she’s happy to be debuting these songs at CMA Fest this week, seven months pregnant, with her past both behind and fully a part of who she is. “I hope people take away that it’s OK to have these contradicting sides,” Perry says. “It’s all a facet in the diamond of humanity.”
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