After enjoying a multi-platinum career with her brothers Neil and Reid as The Band Perry, Kimberly Perry finds her voice as a solo artist with Bloom, out Friday (June 9) via Perry’s new deal with RECORDS Nashville/Columbia Records. The five-song EP marks Perry’s first solo outing since she and her siblings announced a hiatus to pursue individual endeavors.
“I love one-word titles when it comes to an album,” the Grammy winner tells Billboard. “I feel like it leaves a lot of room for somebody to find their own story in a one-word title and Bloom felt like the most excellent description, not only this body of work, but also this season of life.”
Much has changed for Perry since she last released new music with her brothers in 2018. She’s moved to Nashville, married and is expecting her first child, a son they’ll name Whittaker James Costello. She signed a global publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music and Nicolle Galyon’s Songs & Daughters Publishing. She also did a partial catalog sale with global indie publisher AMR Songs, who acquired the Band Perry’s hit “If I Die Young,” which was penned by Perry, and won CMA single and song of the year in 2011.
Perry has re-written that signature hit with Galyon and Jimmy Robbins, adding her perspective as a 39-year-old mother-to-be to the song about a life cut short. She credits AMR’s founder Tamara Conniff with the idea for the new version “If I Die Young, Pt. 2,” the first single from the EP. “We were celebrating our partnership and she stopped eating her breakfast and said, ‘Have you ever thought about writing a sequel to the original over 10 years later? What is that girl thinking about? What is she living— the girl who didn’t actually die young? I would love to hear her story.’ It was this light bulb moment for me.”
The single was most added its first week at country radio, but Perry admits she was a little nervous about how fans would react. “I didn’t want to rob anybody of their experience with the original version because it’s a song that meant so much to so many different people in their time of loss,” she says. “There have been a lot of comments that Part 1 ‘really validated my feelings in that moment, but I’m so grateful to have the Part 2, because it’s like we’re healing our inner child.’ It’s almost like the love letter back to all who fell in love with that original version. It’s this message of, ‘Hold on. Life gets sweeter as we live it.’”
Bloom marks a new creative chapter for Perry, who had been performing with her younger brothers since they were children. The trio signed to Republic Nashville in 2009 and released their self-titled debut album the following year. “If I Die Young,” the group’s second single, rocketed to the top of both the Hot Country Songs chart and Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks. The trio’s sophomore set, Pioneer, released in 2013 and spawned two Country Airplay No. 1 singles: “Better Dig Two” and “Done.”
The Band Perry exited Republic in 2016 and signed with Interscope Records, which many saw as a shift to pop music. Perry says the plan at the time was to continue working country radio while expanding their fan base with a “dual deal between Interscope and UMG Nashville,” hopefully finding success in both pop and country.
“We had experienced that with ‘If I Die Young,’ ‘Done’ and ‘Gonna Dig Two,’ so that was the situation that we were trying to create for ourselves,” Perry recalls. “But I just don’t know that we had the correct songs, and it was a dramatic time where there had been a lot of shak- up. There were a lot of powerful people behind the scenes speaking into what should and should not happen for TBP at that point. Looking back in retrospect, I have no regrets about the way that things happened. Part of life as a human — and definitely as an artist — is putting one foot in front of the other. We make the best decisions that we can with the information that we have at the time.”
After exiting Interscope/Mercury Nashville in 2018, they independently released the five-song EP, Coordinates. Perry says the pandemic prompted discussions about the group’s next creative endeavor: “We’ve done this since we were kids and it’s been wonderful, but we started asking, ‘Have you done everything creatively that you want to do? Are you satisfied? Are there things left on the table for you? And also have you done everything in your personal life that you were hoping for?’”
Those discussions led to the decision to pursue solo opportunities, which led to the creation of Bloom. “It really gave me the liberty to start writing songs with just me and my guitar again,” she says. “The original version of ‘If I Die Young’ that I wrote all by myself in my early 20s kind of became this North Star for me creatively, to remember what I love about writing melody and writing lyrics.”
Over the years, people had suggested she do a solo project, but it never seemed like the right time. “It was finally right, because we had all arrived at this moment in time together that we wanted to speak with our individual voices,” she says.
Finding her voice as a solo artist wasn’t a big challenge for Perry, because of the way she’s always approached songwriting. “I really have to be living it in real time, and it has to come with an experience that I’ve experienced,” she says. “I was just writing about everything that I was going through over the last year and a half, being married, moving to Nashville and having a baby,” she explains. “For the first time in my life, I’m not feeling just as a sister and a daughter, but also as a wife and mother-to-be, so that really helped me figure out how to speak in a solo voice. It was just super empowering. Although I loved being in a band with my brothers, it was a real freedom for me to not have to consider the masculine point of view for a second and to just get to tell my story.”
Perry’s story emerges in such new songs as “Ghosts,” a creative twist on an enduring love that became the catalyst for her EP. “‘Ghost’ was actually the first one I wrote for Bloom, and I didn’t know that I was writing a solo project yet,” she says of the set, which was produced by Robbins. “It was one of the early sessions that I had with Nicolle and Jimmy. I love a good Southern Gothic romantic love song, and it felt like a cool way to talk about finding the love of your lifetime, but not limiting to that. I really loved the idea of ‘”Til death do us part” is for quitters. We’re going to keep this party going.’ It’s a wonderful way for me to honor the fact that I finally got to meet the love of my life and afterlife.”
The incendiary “Burn the House Down” is also a slice of real life set to music that Perry calls one of the most powerful statements on the EP. “It really has the most teeth of these first five songs,” says Perry, who plans to follow with another EP later this year. “It came from this place of owning certain parts of my life, both the rollercoaster of my career, the highs and lows, hits and misses, but also I had a broken first marriage a handful of years ago. There were these moments when I would look around and be like, ‘My life is in ashes. These pieces of my life feel like they are buried under ash,’ and that was a really difficult process to go through, but in ‘Burn the House Down,’ the last line says, ‘You can’t rise from the ashes until you burn the house down.’ It’s part of the process of rebuilding and growing.”
Perry has already been writing for the next project and plans to go in the studio later this month to record. Perry feels fans who have wondered where she’s been and what she’s been doing will get answers in listening to Bloom, but she says it’s not just about her story. “I really hope it’s a project that people don’t just think about my life when they listen to it,” she says, “but it’s meeting them wherever they are in their life and gives them the permission to create whatever space they need to. . . really put themselves in a position to be able to grow and to blossom. I just hope Bloom becomes a best friend to whoever needs it.”
