Linda Perry was five months into filming a documentary when her life was thrown into turmoil. She hadn’t exactly planned to make a film about herself: the frontwoman of 4 Non Blondes and hugely successful songwriter to the stars (Pink, Christina Aguilera, Courtney Love, Adele) had merely agreed to let her friend record some studio footage for social media content. “He just said, ‘Can I come and film you and your process of songwriting?” Perry says. “But then things started happening.”
That’s an uncharacteristic understatement. Towards the end of 2022, Perry was diagnosed with breast cancer. Shortly afterwards, her mother, who had dementia, became gravely ill and died four months later, just as Perry was recovering from a double mastectomy. “And then my meltdown,” Perry adds, referencing an all-consuming artistic and personal identity crisis. “It was a crazy year.” The friend who was filming – Don Hardy, a producer – “saw a clear documentary where I was lost and in my own spin out”.
The situation was made even more fraught given Perry’s family history. Her mum had abused her as a child, which Perry describes as “fully traumatic and dramatic and abusive emotionally, mentally, physically”. So inadvertently, Hardy’s film, Let it Die Here – which has inspired Perry’s solo album of the same name, her first in 27 years – became a moving, raw, unfiltered document of grief, suffering, survival and resolution. “If the documentary was about me and my vanity and how amazing I am, I would never have let that happen,” she says. “But it’s about way more than just me. It’s so honest and real.”
