1 of 2
2 of 2
As any new parent can tell you, the first few months of a baby’s life require tons of adjustment.
The changes come fast. But if you’re singer-songwriter Kimberly Perry, change is starting to feel like old news. She’s getting used to figuring things out on the fly.
“I had no idea what to anticipate,” she says with a weary but still-beaming laugh, speaking just a few weeks after the birth of her first child. “But I’m a quickly learning every day.”
Perry is the former frontwoman and primary songwriter of the chart-topping sibling trio The Band Perry, who most notably scored a 7x Platinum Number One with 2010’s country gothic “If I Die Young.” But following a few more hits, and a brief foray into pop, a new season has begun for the lone TBP sister.
The last few years have kept Perry busy. The East Tennessee native returned to country and moved to Nashville (the first time she’s taken up residence in Music City). She also got married, and on August 26 welcomed her son Whit Costello. She released her solo debut EP, Bloom, back in June, and on October 27, an additional batch of tracks turned the project into Superbloom, helping complete a striking transformation.
“A season of renewal is a great way to say that,” she says. “This whole year started with finishing up some songs for Bloom and the entire time I was pregnant. It was like all of the growth of music was happening alongside a growing baby bump, and it all kind of came to a beautiful little head [with Whit’s birth].”
Calling that moment the “exclamation point” on a whirlwind story, it’s a tale which shows up vividly in Perry’s new music. Far from hiding real life behind vague references, she boldly described what it’s been like to come into her own, starting with a reimagined version of her biggest hit.
“If I Die Young Pt. 2” begins the Bloom project with a quiet fiddle chord, wistfully recalling the dark, old-soul sonics of the original tune. But while that first version found a young girl ready to leave the world behind—convicted in her sense of what a “complete” life looked like—Perry’s new version is infinitely more nuanced.
When you spend your childhood in a family band, you can only dodge the bumps in the road for so long. Perry says her coming of age wasn’t easy—it basically begged her to reimagine the track—and that gives fans a rare opportunity to see an artist revise their work. And maybe even admit they were off the mark.
“I felt the need to update it,” she explains. “I’ve lived a lot of life. I wrote the first version of the song all by myself in my early twenties, and while it’s the same spirit of the girl I am today, I have a little bit more life perspective. There have been so many blessings and a lot of hits and misses. But that song has always been my creative North Star, so it felt like the right way to come full circle.”
The original version started with the striking declaration “If I die young / Bury me in satin,” and turned on the hook “The sharp knife of a short life / Well, I’ve had just enough time.” But part two is more retrospect. More mature.
“I think my favorite line now is ‘I know there’s no such thing / As enough time,’” she says. “I have so much more to lose at this point.”
The rest of Bloom follows suit, brimming with co-written tracks that deal with standing on your own, learning what’s important, and discovering the difference between young love and true love. Perry says each one was about “creating the space” she needed to grow, and that “sometimes that’s a bit of an emotionally violent process.” If you listen closely, the songs parallel the decision she and her siblings in The Band Perry made to dissolve the group, as well as Perry meeting her future husband, Johnny, in October of 2020 The couple wed in a secret Las Vegas ceremony in 2021, and with its three new tracks, Superbloom tells what happened next.
“In nature, a ‘superbloom’ is when the conditions are just so perfect that all of these wildflowers kind of erupt from the ground at the same time,” she says of the theme. “It’s a pretty rare phenomenon, and it really has felt like that’s what’s going on in my life right now. All these dreams were planted, but I hadn’t seen them come to the surface of my life until now, and they’re all kind of popping up at the same time. Having a baby, getting married, moving to Nashville, getting to express myself with a solo voice, and having people welcome me back home. It feels like my life is in a superbloom.”
With a rootsy swagger and just a touch of that Appalachian darkness The Band Perry did so well, “Fool’s Gold” is a standout, written about Perry’s diversion into the pop world. After a decade in mainstream country, she had moved to Los Angeles and tried to put Nashville in the rearview, so the propulsive track is filled with nuggets of sage advice. “Be careful what you’re hitchin’ up your wagon to,” Perry sings. “Your wheels might end up spinnin’ out from under you.”
“That’s advice we all need,” she says with a laugh. “Sometimes we get fooled by a person, sometimes it’s a place, sometimes it’s a thing. It really documents my story going out to LA, and while it was cool to explore, and I’m really grateful for some of the lessons that I learned out on the West Coast, it didn’t always feel a hundred percent like me.”
That’s no longer an issue. With the shadowy “Black Corvette,” Perry delivers a sleek tribute to the car she and Johnny drove to Vegas for their spur-of-the-moment, midnight elopement. The song recalls the haunting banjo riff on the 2x Platinum “Better Dig Two.” Meanwhile, “Monsters” was written as a lullaby to Whit, and the easy-going “God’s Hometown” features a rich vocal stack, tender fiddles, and the heartfelt warmth of a mother’s prayer—a comforting vision of a world where all feel welcome just as they are. That’s the world Perry would like her son to grow up in, and as 2024 approaches, she’s excited to help make it happen. Covering Leonard Cohen’s impassioned epic “Hallelujah” as her first solo Christmas release is a great start. Letting her voice build and soar like an epiphany of self-determination, a spiritual exhale many years in the making, the tune arrives November 10 and soon after, Perry will return to the road. This time making sure things are different.
The “family bus” will find Perry with Johnny and Whit full time, and since she’s finally feeling free and comfortable in her own skin (and in Nashville), she’s bound for a metaphoric summer in full “bloom.”
“I think my dreams have always been to have a family and get to do music,” she says. “Those two things were really interwoven for me, but especially as a woman in the entertainment space, I always thought I would have to choose between the two.
“I’ve gotten to stand on a couple of mountaintops in music, and now we’re starting to climb all over again,” she says. “But to get to see the family side of that realized this year, and also just the empowerment I’ve felt as a woman to be able to build two things at once, it has been really eye-opening.”