‘I have over 100 hats,” says Linda Perry, who is today wearing a fetching western number with a bandana skimming her cheek tattoos in the style of Captain Jack Sparrow. “I don’t really like hair. I had dreads for a long time, then a mohawk. Now I’m just like, ‘Fuck it. I’m not even gonna attempt to have a hairstyle. This is my hairstyle.’”
But the hats on her head are not the only ones Perry wears. As well as being the writer and producer behind some of the most definitive pop songs of the 2000s – having penned tracks for the likes of Christina Aguilera, Pink, Gwen Stefani, Courtney Love, Alicia Keys and Adele – she is also an artist manager, label head, film soundtracker and queer icon. For a time during the new millennium, it was Perry who singers turned to when they wanted a spiky musical makeover. Many of her early forays into hit-making leaned into rebellious rabble-rousing, with rising stars spouting such pouty lines as “kissing my ass” and “stupid ho”. Most memorable were Pink’s Get the Party Started, Stefani’s solo comeback What You Waiting For? and Love’s Mono.
Perhaps they gravitated not just to Perry’s hooks but to her sense of freedom amid a rigid label machine that was manufacturing new artists by the second. By the new millennium, she’d already been in 4 Non Blondes, the all-out lesbian US rock band for whom she wrote the 1993 megahit What’s Up. Despite their success, they were vehemently anti-commercial and seemed ahead of their time, but Perry dismisses any such notion now. “I don’t think there’s anything radical or progressive about my band,” she says. “We sold 7m records.”
Still – during the Aids crisis and the rampant homophobia that came with it, as well as flaring tensions over abortion rights in the wake of the conservative Reagan era – Perry played a guitar on which she had taped the words “dyke” and “choice”. She says the producers of David Letterman’s chatshow once told her to remove them. “I knew it would make people feel uncomfortable,” she says. “I believe in being queer and I believe in us having choice because at that time – another time, in the 90s – we were fighting for abortion rights. So that was my statement: dyke and choice.” Besides, she says later, “I don’t give a fuck what people think.”
Perry, 57, is on a video call from her studio in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. It’s noticeably light-filled, which helps her to keep regular hours so she can spend time with Rhodes, her son with ex-wife and actor Sara Gilbert. Endless gleaming guitars encircle a recording booth with giant antlers hanging above it. Black and white photos of musical legends line the walls, not a gold disc in sight. It’s here, in this rock’n’roll oasis, that Dolly Parton turned up one day to record. Perry was producing the soundtrack for the Netflix film Dumplin’ and ambitiously rearranged some of Parton’s classic songs, as well as writing originals with the country legend – work that earned Perry her fifth Grammy nomination.
“She called me a weird gal,” says Perry fondly. “And then she said she’s attracted to weird people. I took it as a big compliment.” Parton had “never worked with a woman before, writer or producer” and they became “creative soulmates” who shared a hard-working ethic. “She sang something like seven songs in one day and nailed them.”
Perry says she has to work with artists she likes. She has in the past been critical of singers such as Katy Perry, of whose music she said: “She’s not reinventing the wheel, she’s not giving substance.” To this producer, substance is of the utmost…
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