On her new EP, Bloom, Kimberly Perry offers an intimate portrait of her life through five gorgeous songs that prove she still has the capability to write a compelling country song. Introducing the project with “If I Die Young Pt. 2,” Perry is honest about a lot of life she’s lived since writing the original “If I Die Young,” which helped make The Band Perry a superstar act in country music more than a decade ago.
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The Band Perry has since gone on hiatus, but Perry is striking out on her own. In a Q&A with American Songwriter, Perry opens up about her vulnerable songwriting process, the love song she wrote for her husband Johnny Costello, and why she’s excited to sing these songs with fans.
American Songwriter (AS): You named the EP Bloom, which seems very reflective of where you’re at. Talk about where that title came from and what that word means to you.
Kimberly Perry (KP): Everything is blooming, all at the same time music is blooming. I have a baby, which also felt like a very appropriate thing. He’s here, so we need to acknowledge him in this whole process. But it really came from the line in “If I Die Young [Pt. 2],” I’ve had time to bloom. And I do think that’s a combination of outlasting the process and letting things unfold for us as individuals and humans, but also creating the space to be able to have things grow.
There’s some songs like “Cry at Your Funeral,” “Burn the House Down” that 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. While sometimes those moments feel tumultuous, I was also very aware that this is happening to create space for all the things to come – family to grow, music to grow. And so the Bloom project is really, I think, the most transparent lyric writing that I’ve done, because it was happening in such real-time as things in my universe were shifting.
AS: Is there a song on this EP that you feel was the most vulnerable to write?
KP: I think all the songs on the EP have their vulnerable moments because they each spoke to a very specific side of what I was walking through. One of my favorites is a song called “Ghosts,” which was the first track actually written for the EP. I wrote it with Nicolle Galyon and Jimmy Robins, and it was my version of a love song.
As the singer of “Better Dig Two,” I heard somebody, I sang it recently, and they were like, “It’s like the girl that sang ‘Better Dig Two’, but less psycho and more earnest.'” I was like, I can agree with that. But I love it because it was the first song written for my husband. It was the first song I was like, ‘This is the Bloom project that we’re making. This is me singing in a solo voice,’ and it felt like a really highly personal statement to make to him and about my marriage that I felt so grateful to find and just seem like I’ve found my love of a lifetime and the after-lifetime. That’s kind of what it’s about.
AS: Why did you want to be so transparent on the EP?
KP: I think for me as a songwriter, I do not have the gift to just take a nebulous concept, or even just a great title and go, “Let me create this universe around these words.” I have to really be living it in an experiential way to be able to write about it. So much was going down in my life over the last year and a half. I think that’s really what informed it being so vulnerable and transparent. My craft just happened to align with what I was walking through. So it’s amazing that it happened, it maybe wasn’t as much my intention that I set that I was conscious of, but I have to write real life or I can’t write it all.
AS: What are some of those vulnerable moments that you channeled into the songs?
KP: I think one of the most transparent songs on the Bloom EP is “Burn the House Down.” It talks about these moments where we look around – and either it’s happened without us doing intentionally, or sometimes we just light the match ourselves – but everything burning down in your life and starting from a clean slate. I feel like there were definitely touchstones over the last handful of years with relationships in my life, or a broken first marriage, or even a career that from time to time felt so out of control, that it felt like there are moments when everything was in ashes.
But I truly feel like ashes also add calcium to our bones and to our hearts. And it was like, “Okay, we’re not buried, we’re just planted, but we have to be down here for a second and rise from these ashes and figure out how to do that.” But to do that, sometimes you have to flatline, get the clean slate and rebuild from there. So I feel like that song was really about me owning some things and some experiences from the past, but also going, “Our experiences from the past don’t have to define our future. We just have to let them strengthen us to be able to carve out that future for ourselves.”
AS: How do you hope that this EP impacts the people who hear it?
KP: I hope that the Bloom EP is a really healing moment for people because it was definitely that for me writing it. Healing sometimes comes from these violent disturbances in our life, but it adds the gravity and the purpose to those and it almost adds purpose to those moments because you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s all a part of the journey to getting to the healthiest place that we can be, so I really hope that people take it away in that manner.
I also feel like these melodies are so big, they’re so giant, I’m excited to get it on the road so we can all sing it together. I love a campfire sing-along more than anything else, so to get to travel all over the place and really bring these songs to life with multiple voices is one thing I’m the most excited about.
Photo by Claire Schaper / Courtesy of 2B Entertainment
