Linda Perry has never been the kind of person who softens what she means. At 61, the Grammy-nominated songwriter and former 4 Non Blondes frontwoman sat down with Out Magazine to talk about her first solo album in more than 25 years, a 17-track project called Let It Die Here.
The album came out after the death of her mother, and somewhere between discussing grief, music, and the state of the world, Perry also decided to call Donald Trump a “moron” in the most Linda Perry way possible: bluntly, casually, and without acting like she needed to workshop the sentence with a publicist first.
The interview dropped on May 8, the same day that both Let It Die Here and its companion documentary were released. The documentary, directed by Don Hardy, apparently started almost by accident during a deeply personal period in Perry’s life. Perry admitted that if she had known from the beginning that someone was making a documentary about her, she probably would have tried to manage the story herself.
She Was Troubled, She Was Homeless, She Was One of the Freaks
Long before Perry became the person behind massive hits like “Beautiful” for Christina Aguilera and “Get the Party Started” for P!nk, she was a queer teenager hanging out in Balboa Park in San Diego with people society usually pushed to the edges. And the way she talks about those years now feels very different from the polished celebrity origin stories people usually give in interviews. There is no dramatic Hollywood rewrite where every rough moment magically becomes inspirational background music.
“We were freaks!” she told Out. “It was all my queer friends, all my punks, the drag queens, the drug addicts, all of us partied in one park. Although I was troubled and homeless, it was one of the funnest times of my life. There was an innocence in the recklessness and darkness.”
That quote alone tells a lot about Perry’s personality. She talks about homelessness, chaos, queerness, addiction, and survival with the kind of honesty that makes most media-trained celebrities break into a cold sweat. Meanwhile, Perry is over here basically saying, “Yeah, life was messy, but we still had a time,” which feels very Gen X rock musician in the most accurate way possible.
She has also been openly lesbian throughout her career, which matters here because when Perry talks about queer people surviving difficult political moments, she is speaking from decades of lived experience. She has been in this conversation since before half the internet learned what a discourse thread was.
‘This Is Elevated Because He Really Is a Moron’
When the interview shifted toward politics, Perry explained that she has leaned heavily on both her family and the LGBTQ+ community to navigate the current climate. That context matters because her comments did not come across as random celebrity outrage tossed online between skincare ads.
“We’ve had dickheads like Trump before,” she began. “This is elevated because he really is a moron, but it’s also elevated because we don’t know what’s real or fake. The gay community is probably always going to have struggles, just like women. I don’t want to be equal to a man. Why would I? I don’t want to be equal, but I do want to be seen as valid and important.”
And really, Perry talks about politics the same way she talks about music or grief: directly, with zero interest in sanding down the sharp edges for mass approval. There is also something very funny about a 61-year-old rock musician casually calling the President a moron while promoting an emotional album about loss. Multi-tasking really is a skill.
At the same time, Perry’s point about validity versus equality is pretty clear. She is talking about recognition and legitimacy on her own terms, rather than constantly being measured against standards set by others. That idea carried into what she said next, especially when the conversation turned toward the future of the LGBTQ+ community.
“The community has always been strong. We’ve been fighting for a very long time. We will continue to fight and we always come up. We always survive. We’re always the underdog that will prevail and be standing here. You know who won’t be? Trump.”
View this post on Instagram
Two Institutions, One Diagnosis
At some point, Perry was dragging the modern music industry a little. According to her, record labels have stopped prioritizing talent and started chasing follower counts instead, which is probably the one statement that can make every struggling musician and every exhausted A&R executive fight in the comments at the same time.
“There’s people that shouldn’t be out there playing music,” she said. “There’s people on TikTok that would never see the light of day if it wasn’t for social media. We lost the rock star. We lost the intimacy. We lost the mystery. Labels are ridiculous. All they do is sign people that have followers now.”
You can practically hear every older musician nodding aggressively while reading that. Perry is arguing that the industry traded mystique for algorithms, and honestly, she is not exactly alone in feeling that way.
Still, Perry did carve out one exception. She praised Taylor Swift’s fanbase, saying the Swifties’ loyalty reminded her of the dedicated support rock stars once commanded before social media turned artists into constant content creators.
View this post on Instagram
The Album She Never Planned To Write
Let It Die Here is Perry’s first solo album in more than 25 years, and she wrote its 17 tracks in roughly three weeks after her mother died. That period followed another difficult chapter in her life after she was diagnosed with breast cancer during an elective breast reduction surgery in 2021, eventually choosing a double mastectomy after doctors discovered triple-negative cancer.
“I come from a very different place musically. This album is very deep, very personal, and very emotional,” she said. “My mother passed and all of these emotions showed up. I come from a place of honesty. I’m not the person you go to for hits. If you want depth, I’m the person you come to.”
That last line especially feels like Perry summing up her entire career in one sentence. She has written giant pop hits for other people for years, but this project sounds far more tied to her own life, including experiences with abuse, grief, and survival.
The companion documentary also received strong attention after premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2024 before opening in theaters alongside the album release.
The Weight Behind the Words
What gives Perry’s comments weight is not really the insult toward Trump. Plenty of celebrities insult Trump every day before breakfast. The bigger thing here is the history behind what she is saying and the fact that she sounds completely uninterested in packaging herself to make it easier to market.
She has spent more than three decades in the music industry while openly gay, writing for massive artists and rarely centering herself in the process. Now, with Let It Die Here, she is finally putting her own story front and center, and the political comments align with that same honesty.