Kimberly Perry can still feel the surge of excitement running through her veins the first time she wrote a song. She was in a high school band with some of her peers when she began to wonder if she had the capability of writing a song. Putting her thought into action, the teen wrote her first song which made its debut during band rehearsal.
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“To hear the band rehearse a song that I had written was other-worldly for me,” Perry tells American Songwriter. “That’s really when I got addicted to the craft of songwriting.”
While her bandmates eventually turned their attention elsewhere, Perry kept her sights laser focused on music. Rehearsals soon turned into casual jam sessions in her parent’s living room with younger brothers Neil and Reid, who were just 8 and 10 years old at the time, respectively, and over time resulted in the formation of The Band Perry. Though they initially leaned more toward rock, the band’s sound was defined one fateful weekend at the family’s home in East Tennessee when Perry wrote the tender-hearted ballad “If I Die Young” alone in her bedroom. A stark contrast to the indie rock record they’d just made, it was producer Paul Worley who encouraged them to scrap the album and instead record “If I Die Young.”
“That really resonated with us at the time,” Perry recalls. “‘If I Die Young’ truly was the catalyst for us beginning and defining our career in country music.”
The song forged The Band Perry’s path in country music as it touched the hearts of fans far and wide. It became a crossover hit, topping the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. It set the stage for the next five years, as The Band Perry dominated the genre with hits “Better Dig Two,” “Done,” and others.
The band began to change course in 2015, releasing pop-rock singles and albums before announcing a hiatus in 2023 for the siblings to focus on solo projects. This led Perry to Bloom, her debut solo EP, which arrived on June 9. She introduced the project with “If I Die Young Pt. 2,” featuring updated lyrics with the “hard-won” wisdom she’s gained since she wrote the original song more than a decade ago.
“‘If I Die Young’ served as a North Star for me creatively because it truly felt like a snapshot of the most pure way that I hear and create melody and that I write lyrics,” she says of the song. The lyrics in the sequel reference her husband Johnny Costello as well as the fact that they’re expecting their first child in August. “I have life wisdom to add to that now, so my subject matter can grow. But to remember the origin of my melody writing and lyric writing, that’s been a really important song for me. Updating it with the life lessons I have collected felt like a really impactful moment. This is my very transparent, womanly experience that I’m singing about now.”
Writing “Pt. 2” brought Perry back to center, her state of mind coming through in such lyrics as I’ve had time to bloom. The song was the catalyst for the five-song EP that showcases Perry’s thought-provoking songwriting. “Everything is blooming all at the same time music is blooming,” she describes. “The Bloom project is really the most transparent lyric writing that I’ve done because it was happening in real time as things in my universe were shifting.”
Perry acknowledges that each song has its vulnerable moment, pointing to “Ghosts” as her favorite song. Co-written with Nicolle Galyon and Jimmy Robbins, Perry calls it a “personal statement” that was the first song she wrote for her husband. Then there’s “Cry at Your Funeral” and “Burn the House Down,” which she says “speak to a lot of intrinsic relationships and environments changing for me that I was living in real time over the last year and a half.”
But Perry cites “Burn the House Down” as the EP’s most vulnerable track. “I feel like that song was really about me owning some things and experiences from the past, but also our experiences from the past don’t have to define our future,” she says. “We have to let them strengthen us to be able to carve out that future for ourselves.”
Perry is paving a future for herself where she’s letting her voice take the lead, in hopes that the messages of Bloom bring as much healing into fans’ lives as they did her own.
“I hope that the Bloom EP is a really healing moment for people because it was definitely that for me writing it,” she says. “Healing sometimes comes from these violent disturbances in our life, but it adds purpose to those moments because you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s all a part of the journey to get into the healthiest place that we can be. I really hope that people take it away in that manner.”
Kimberly Perry main Photo by Claire Schaper / 2b Entertainment)
