Linda Perry: Musician, songwriter and producer

The above activities have given Perry a modest reputation in the more left field areas of the music industry, but during the last decade she has acquired mainstream fame and recognition as a writer and producer of commercial hit songs aimed at the global youth market. She’s (co-)penned a whole swathe of international hits, including for Pink (‘Get The Party Started’), Gwen Stefani (‘What You Waiting For?’), Christina Aguilera (the Grammy-winning ‘Beautiful’), and has also worked with Alicia Keys, Celine Dion, Courtney Love, Faith Hill, Solange, Kelly Osbourne, James Blunt, Sierra Swan and many others. And in many cases Perry (co-)wrote, produced and engineered tracks for these artists. She’s one of the few successful female producers working in the music industry, and the fact that she also ‘womans’ the mixing desk, often at her own Kung Fu Gardens studio in Hollywood, makes this even more remarkable. Finally, Perry has a reputation as an astute business and A&R woman, having founded Custard Records, to which she signed James Blunt, and recently begun a publishing company, Cold Water Music.

Indisputably, Perry, like her voice, tears through the international music industry like a force of nature. On the phone from Los Angeles, while the preparations for a launch party for the debut CD of the Crash Kings (signed to Custard) carry on around her, she talks about building an “empire” and is ebullient about the future of the music industry, and with that her own companies. So far, so good. But unusually, she’s also disconcertingly forthcoming about the artistic shortcomings of several of the hits she’s helped create in recent years. Few would publicly describe their breakthrough hit as “a joke”, a recent hit as “weak”, and her recent activities as “dumbing down.” It sounds like someone biting the hand that feeds, and one wonders whether it’s a sign of a struggle to maintain artistic integrity, or just Perry being ruthlessly realistic about her work in one particular arena and how this serves her attempts to create her ‘empire’. Or that she’s simply being more honest and, perhaps in talking to the press like this, naive than most.

Beginner’s mind also, in Perry’s view, makes her a better and more productive songwriter. It means, for instance, that she refuses to learn about music theory. “I have musician friends that are geniuses and know everything about music and know everything they are going to do before they do it. Yet they struggle all the time; they don’t know how to write songs properly. They are just way too educated. I don’t want to be the kind of musician who knows everything. All I want to do is write songs and record them and put them out there. I don’t want to be some kind of music geek who knows every frigging diminished chord. I want to stumble on these chords.

“Of course, I’ve learned a lot of things over the years, and I’ve grown as a guitar player and a piano player. But the more I know, the slower my songwriting process will be. So I keep myself at a slow pace when it comes to learning about certain things. I don’t need to read music. Why should I need that? I come up with string or choir arrangements, but don’t need to be geeking out and writing the charts as well. I simply need a guy who is educated to take it to the next level.”

Perry’s intuitive, naive approach is aimed at harnessing creative energy, wherever that may come from. For many people this idea has spiritual overtones, and Perry clarifies that she’s not spiritual in a church-going, traditional sense and regards God as simply “energy. I believe in the power of the universe: if you want something and you put it out there, you will get it. And I believe that your gut instinct is far superior than your brain. Never follow what your head is telling you, because you get confused. If you follow your gut, it will always take you to the right place.”

All these exhortations go a long way to explaining Perry’s approach to songwriting, as well as why she has become so successful during the last decade. Her method is to try to write songs using ample amounts of gut instinct and as little head as possible. In trying to achieve that, Perry subscribes to the stream-of-consciousness method of songwriting, and she seems to be adept at tapping into something larger than herself, because, amazingly, many songs arrive in one piece.

“Sometimes I’ll go weeks of not being able to write because I’m producing and recording,” explains Perry, “and I’m getting drum sounds or guitar tones and all that kind of stuff. I love geeking out on that stuff. But while I’m doing it I can feel the creative build-up inside of me. And every few days — or at most every other week — I’ll take a break, set Pro Tools in record, put my headphones on and sit down at the piano or with a guitar, or whatever I feel like playing. I go by instinct: I have written songs playing a beat on the drums, or on bass or organ. A wave of music will come over me that may last five minutes or two hours, and it is as if I was listening to my own iTunes and had pressed ‘play’. Usually, I’ll have the chorus and the verse melodies, the arrangement, and an idea of what I’m singing about. On average, about 70 percent of the lyrics will be there. Then I’ll go, ‘Next!’ and another song will come out.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t feel like I’m writing these songs, because I’m just playing and going with my feelings. I will just keep going and will often wonder, ‘Did I just write that, or is this something that’s already known?’ Especially if it sounds too hooky for me to have come up with it on my own. I’ll send my manager the stuff and I’ll ask her, and she’ll go, ‘Linda, you go through this every single time,’ and we laugh. A while back I came up with a song that I really liked and that I thought was really kooky, and I sent it to my manager. It was just me sitting at a piano and ad-libbing, and I had temporarily called it the ‘La La Song’. Unbeknown to me, my manager sent it to this Italian artist, Guisy Ferreri, and later called me to say that they loved that song. I was like, ‘What song? I was just ad-libbing!’ I went back and wrote the words that I used, and hardly changed anything. The whole song was there.”

“Some people are afraid to ad-lib. They don’t allow themselves that experience because you make yourself vulnerable when you open your mouth and start singing whatever comes out. Sometimes a lot of crap comes out, a lot of stupidity. At other times I come up with the most brilliant lyrics that I would never have been able to think of in a million years, even if I tried my hardest. You simply have to allow yourself to sit down, be vulnerable and open your mouth and sing whatever the hell comes out.

“In any case, the music is not mine, so how can I judge it? I am just allowing the experience to happen, not judging or editing it as it happens, and either something good or bad comes out. Who cares? I feel blessed to be able to sit down and understand this and simply be open. I think I’m really good at what I do now, and it is because I’m open to the experiences of good or bad, or stagnation, or moving forward.

“I have written tons and tons of songs like that, and later on I’ll figure out what I have and edit. I’ll smooth things out and get the lyrical content a little tighter. These days, I spend a little bit more time listening to what I’m doing and making sure that I’m not being lazy. I’m really into story-telling now, whereas I used to be vague with my lyrics and leave a lot up to the imagination. But now I’m starting to be very particular about wanting to write a story that you can visualise. Having said that, I don’t keep a catalogue of what I’ve written. I don’t believe in that. I try to write everything fresh, on the spot. My songs come from my vulnerabilities and emotions, from my personal experiences at a certain moment. So when I work with somebody, it’s rare that I pull something out that I have worked on a long time ago.”

In fact, Perry’s greatest hit, ‘Beautiful’, was a previously written song that she handed to Christina Aguilera. It was a career- and life-changing move, which is covered in some detail below. Another pre-written Perry song, ‘Knock Me Out’, is inarguably one of her greatest, and it also features another characteristic of her songwriting career: her eagerness to write with others. This was already in evidence on the first official release in which she was involved, the 4 Non Blondes’ only album, Bigger, Better, Faster, More! (1992). Perry had a hand in all but one of the 11 songs on the album, wrote five by herself and co-wrote the other five. Many of these songs have prose-like lyrics that read like a diary entry of a particular moment: “I’m looking out of the window / The view that I see” or “Stumbled my way on the darkest afternoon / I got a beer in my hand” The big hit, ‘What’s Up’, charts the reflections of a young woman wondering where her life will go: “Twenty-five years of my life and still / I’m trying to get up that great big hill / Of hope / For a destination”

While much of Bigger, Better, Faster, More! sounds like the slightly narcissistic ruminations most of us experience during adolescence and early adulthood, the stirring ‘Knock Me Out’ and most of the album on which it can be found, In Flight, is much more mature and raises the bar considerably. Perry comments, “I probably came up with that song about five months before I started working with Bill [Bottrell]. Marty [Willson-Piper, guitarist of Australian band the Church] helped me with a chorus that completely changed. The part he helped me with didn’t end up in the final version, but because we worked together I also credited him for the songwriting. When the song was recorded, I felt that it wasn’t ready and called Grace Slick to see if she was interested in singing on it. The song is about an abusive relationship, and Grace wanted to make it a duo song; she wanted to take the other person’s side. She scribbled down a bunch of words, I put up a microphone, and she did three takes, from which I comped the vocal. It was like a modern blues song; it was like ‘just feel it’ — and we did.”

“Bill took the chains off and let me be me. Eighty percent of In Flight was literally done with me sitting with an acoustic guitar and a microphone, cigarettes and a glass of wine next to me, sometimes smoking pot, and just singing whatever came to my mind — or rather, whatever came out. Bill was there, and the other musicians and he would join in. We’d make a couple of adjustments, did a couple of overdubs, and that was the song. The vocals were all live; I never punched anything in. When I became a producer-songwriter later on, I wanted to share the same experience with everybody. I thank Bill endlessly for that wonderful experience, and I still borrow from Bill’s knowledge and creativity.”

In Flight sadly nosedived from a commercial point of view. Perry had another stab at solo stardom with the follow-up, After Hours (1999), released on her own Rockstar Records, but by this stage she was regularly sinking her own money into her solo career. Some twists of fate during 2001 generated unexpected success and galvanised her current producer-songwriter role.

“I always believed that I’d be analogue until the day I die,” recalls Perry, “but one day I decided to get an Akai MPC and a Triton keyboard, loaded up some sounds, and started putting these loops together. I grabbed a bass, put down a part, added some sampled horns, and played some wah-wah guitar all the way through. I was just having fun and singing every cliché I could think of, like ‘Pump up the volume’, ‘I’m coming up, let’s get the party started’. I was f**king around; the song was a joke. When I played it to my manager, she was like, ‘What’s that?!’ We laughed and I said, ‘I’ve written a dance hit!’ Literally a week later, Pink calls up and wants to meet me and work with me. I didn’t play her the song until our second meeting. She took it to L.A. Reed [her label manager] and he was like, ‘That’s our first single.’”

The name of the song was ‘Get The Party Started’, and it appeared on Pink’s second and breakthrough album, Missundaztood (2001), also reaching the Top Five in more than a dozen countries. It was a wonderful achievement for Perry — and Pink — but also throws up a number of questions. One wonders how it was, and is, for Perry to spend years bashing her head against the wall with artistically legitimate music and then hit the jackpot with a throwaway ‘piece of fluff’. Moreover, did this sudden arrival of the big time answer the question she posed herself in the song ‘Success’ on In Flight: “Will success fail me, or will it make me free?” Perry seems to shrug her shoulders in response, “I stopped taking things personal 20 years ago. Basically, this business is just a matter of opinion and people’s personal taste. My personal taste is that I like ‘70s music, but somebody else may think that Radiohead, Coldplay and the White Stripes make the best music in the whole world.”

“I think I even performed it a couple of times to try it out, with the lyrics not yet all written,” recalls Perry. “After working with Pink, I sat down and finished the lyrics to the song, and then Christina asked me to work with her. I played her that song, purely because I’d just finished the lyrics. She was like, ‘I want that,’ and I was like, ‘Oh no, wait a minute, that’s not what I intended.’ I knew that if I wanted a career as a solo artist, that song was going to do it.

“I allowed Christina to do a demo of it and hearing her sing it gave me goosebumps, and I realised that the song was hers. At that point, I closed any thoughts about being an artist down and said, ‘I’m now Linda Perry, songwriter-producer.’ I actually cried about it, because I’m a front person, I can go on stage and be a great personality, and I had still been hanging on. But I was not happy doing it, and so I welcomed my new career and came back bigger than ever. I am now completely happy and love what I do, and I would never have gotten where I am now as an artist.”

‘Beautiful’ appeared on Aguilera’s best-selling Stripped album, which contained another three songs produced by Perry and co-written by her and Aguilera. Perry also had a hand in writing and producing eight of the 14 songs that appeared on Pink’s Missundaztood album, writing six of them with the singer and two alone. Since then, a whole stream of singers — Celine Dion, Courtney Love, Faith Hill, Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keys and many, many others — have found their way to Perry, asking her to either provide songs for them or co-write with them, and in most cases to produce these songs. If that gives the impression that Perry is often called in to troubleshoot creatively stuck artists, then that is more or less exactly right.

“I love music, I create music and I produce music,” observes Perry, “and I try to help people find their vision. Sometimes it’s hard for people to put into words what they want to do, and sometimes it’s hard for them to know what they want to express. I can help with that, because I’m really good at that stuff. I am very sensitive to energies and to people, and I immediately adapt to the energy of the person I work with, because it’s very important to keep them in their environment. They are the ones who have to go out and perform and sell this stuff. So people started having very therapeutic moments in working with me, because I would dig a little deeper and that would allow me to draw out of them what they wanted to express. They would tell me some heart-wrenching stories and they’d walk out feeling relieved. I often get told that working with me is like going to a therapist.

“The way I like to co-write is by telling people that I don’t like to write their lyrics, because they and I come from entirely different places. So I’ll come up with a melody and an arrangement, and I tell them, ‘You write the lyrics.’ However, in a lot of situations I end up writing the lyrical content after all, because it may be needed to write a great song. In other cases, when the artist has written the lyrics, I may think, ‘Ugh! It’s not where I am,’ and then realise that it’s not about me.

“That’s the beauty of what I experience on a daily basis. If it was about me, I’d be writing sappy, depressing songs about whatever I was going through, but since it’s not about me, I can throw my hands up in the air and go, ‘OK, Linda, let it fly. What’s wrong with dumbing down? Sometimes you have to.’ And you know what? Dumbing down is great!”

In other words, ‘New Dawn’ was perfect for Celine Dion. This version was one of Perry’s many successful collaborations during the past decade. However, her most productive partnership has arguably been with Christina Aguilera. After the success of Stripped, Perry had a writing and production hand in nine of the songs on the singer’s Back To Basics album (2006), including the hits ‘Candyman’ and ‘Hurt’. Perry also contributed two songs to Aguilera’s greatest hits album, Keeps Gettin’ Better (2008), including the title song, which also became a worldwide hit.

“Christina said that she wanted to make an electronic record,” says Perry. “I don’t really do electronic music, so I was really excited about it and I got my MPC out again, got some keyboards and started coming up with a bunch of music. I gave her 10 songs to choose from, but then she told me that she had to put this greatest hits album out and she was only going to choose two songs out of the 10 that I had come up with.

“She chose ‘Dynamite’ and ‘Keeps Gettin’ Better’. I was curious why she picked the latter, because to me it was the weakest of these 10 songs. Honestly, I didn’t like the song at all. She told me what she wanted it to be about lyrically, so we sat down together and wrote lyrics. It’s not my favourite song and it’s not my favourite lyric: ‘I’m a super bitch / Up to my own tricks,’ etc. I have to throw my hands up in the air and just go, ‘I am not the one going out and singing it.’ She was happy and that is all that matters! I have to realise, ‘Hey, the artists have instincts too.’ So I backed off.”

It appears that Perry is backing off these days in her work with a number of artists. She played a significant role in writing and producing sections of Courtney Love’s debut album American Sweetheart (2004), and played an even more crucial part in the follow-up, Nobody’s Daughter, which was supposed to be released this summer. But, according to Perry, Love does not want to see it released.

“I think too many demons showed up for her during the making of this record. I think it’s a really great record, but she thinks it’s not rock enough, whereas I think it’s too heavy.” Perry appears once again to shrug her shoulders. She says she doesn’t really want to talk about projects that haven’t been released yet, but does let it slip that she’s finishing a new album with Christina Aguilera.

One does get the impression, though, that Perry’s real focus is on expanding her ‘empire’ and supporting the artists and releases on her Custard Records. She’s already discovered and broken James Blunt, and is now pushing acts like Crash Kings, Bigelf and Reni Lane, many of whom she also produces. She’s very enthusiastic and, contrary to the general tendency in the music industry, wildly optimistic. “Everybody thinks that these are the worst times ever, but I think these are the best times,” opines Perry. “Basically, the music industry just got a massive colonic, and all the waste and toxic bulls**t that didn’t need to be there is gone. The f**king guys sitting at their f**king labels paying themselves $2 million a year no longer exist. It’s back to sales of two million per record being good, and I think that’s great.

“So the music industry is being primed and they’re freaking out and everybody is getting fired, and they’re dropping bands that should never have been signed to begin with. This big cleanout is creating space for new great bands to come in with new styles of music. While everybody is running scared, I’m signing bands and spending money and taking risks. My publishing company is going to be very specific in catering for songwriters and protecting them. I’m going to give people that write great songs great deals, and the company is going to rock.”

Obviously, Linda Perry can do these things on the back of songs like ‘Get The Party Started’ and ‘Keeps Gettin’ Better’. In the context of her growing ‘empire’ and the new acts she’s pushing, somehow these song titles seem particularly apt.