Linda Perry – What Lies With You

She wrote it the night before, walked into a rehearsal room with the lyrics unfinished and a film crew already rolling, and it turned into the whole album.

Linda Perry told the director filming her that she needed to go into a rehearsal room and jam, and that he was welcome to come along. She had no plan. The night before, she wrote a song called What Lies With You, and she arrived at the room still working on the lyrics. She has said since that it started the whole album, and that she surprised herself with where it came from.

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None of it was supposed to happen. Don Hardy had set out to make a documentary about Perry, and Perry had not set out to make a record. She has spent most of the past three decades on the other side of the glass, writing and producing for Christina Aguilera, Pink and Dolly Parton, scoring films, and running a nonprofit, after 4 Non Blondes broke up in the middle of their second album and left her with a 1993 single that reached No.1 in ten countries and a reputation she never entirely wanted.

What Hardy’s cameras caught was a woman working out what she was carrying, and the songs came out as a byproduct. Seventeen of them. Kill Rock Stars and 670 Records released Let It Die Here on May 8, 2026, Perry’s first solo album in more than 25 years, and she produced and engineered it herself.

The album is about her childhood and her mother. Perry has described years of feeling she had to look over her shoulder, never safe, and has pointed at two songs in particular: one where she takes her mother on, and this one, where, in her words, “you hear me struggling to say goodbye.” Mojo gave the record four stars. Classic Rock called it polished and classy. SPIN said she turns psychic chaos into gold.

From a rehearsal room to the Oscar conversation

Linda Perry: Let It Die Here premiered at the Tribeca Festival in 2024, played more than twenty American cities and London through 2026, and arrived on Hulu on September 18, 2026. Its distributors have qualified it for Academy Award consideration in the documentary feature category, and What Lies With You, written by Perry and featured in the film, is being campaigned for Best Original Song. The Hollywood Reporter has listed it among the contenders. Nothing is nominated yet; the nominations come in the new year.

The official video arrived on Perry’s channel this week, days after the Hulu premiere, giving the song its own release moment four months after the album carried it out into the world.

The timing is unusually crowded for someone who spent decades declining to be the artist. 4 Non Blondes reunited in 2025, and What’s Up? found an entirely new audience through a TikTok mashup that topped the platform’s trending chart. Perry is simultaneously the woman behind other people’s biggest records, the frontwoman of a band that broke up more than thirty years ago, and, at 61, a solo artist with a new album and a song in an Oscar race.

All of which comes from one night of writing before a shoot she had no plan for. She has been the person who hands songs to other singers for most of her working life. This is the one she kept, written in a hurry, finished in the room, and it turned out to be the door into everything else.