Linda Perry wears many hats, both literally and figuratively, but she never expected anybody to make a film about her. A few years ago, when the singer, songwriter and producer agreed to let her friend Don Hardy follow her around with a camera, she thought she might get a few good clips out of it for social media. “I swear to f***ing God,” says Perry in her melodious California drawl. “I would never, ever, go: ‘Hey, let’s make a documentary about my life.’”

That was before she found herself undergoing a double mastectomy after a chance cancer diagnosis, while simultaneously confronting her difficult relationship with her dying mother. She was also fretting that she’d lost the ability to write for herself. “I had a breakdown, and the f***ing camera was there for it,” the 61-year-old tells me over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “I can’t even f***ing believe I’ve allowed this to come out.”

The resulting film, Let It Die Here, is a raw, intimate portrait of a singular musician. Best known for her vocal pyrotechnics on “What’s Up?”, the world-conquering 1993 single she wrote and sang for the band 4 Non Blondes, Perry went on to become one of the most sought-after writer-producers of the 2000s thanks to a string of hits – among them Pink’s “Get the Party Started”, Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful”, and Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?”.

Perry has a talent for understanding what makes an artist tick. She can help pop singers find an edge, and polished stars to bare their souls. Over the decades, she has helped draw songs out of the likes of Dolly Parton, Kate Hudson and Adele, becoming one of only six women ever to be nominated for Best Production (Non-Classical) in the history of the Grammys. Tongue-in-cheek, she credits at least part of her success to her impressive array of headgear.

“The hats feel like armour to me, they feel protective,” she explains. “I do think it helps me, because I’m an emotional person, and I feel a lot. I’m an empath – that’s why people like working with me.” It only takes a few moments in conversation with Perry to realise she’s not big on small talk. She has the sort of no-nonsense, let’s-get-down-to-brass-tacks personality that cuts through vague pleasantries. She is not, she makes clear, a producer who gets hired to make generic pop. “I’m not studying how to write a hit,” she continues. “I’m not ripping off other people’s melodies and listening to BPMs. People come to me for emotion.”

Yet at the same time as her production career soared, she struggled to express her own perspective in music. “Here I was telling people how great they are, and bringing out the amazingness in them, and I couldn’t even find it in myself,” she says. “I felt like a f***ing fraud.”

It was only in her own heightened state of emotion, following the death of her mother Marluce in December 2022, that Perry returned to making music under her own name. With Hardy’s cameras still rolling, she brought together a band, a string section and backing singers to record “What Lies with You”, the song that would lead to her first solo album in 27 years – also titled Let It Die Here – which is out today. “My God, that started it all,” she remembers. “When I opened up that window, all the birds flew in. It was like: ‘OK, it’s time to write this.’ I wrote the whole album in three weeks.”

My mom always remained very manipulative… I would buckle and feel guilty and trapped

In “What Lies with You”, Perry describes her mother as “the hero, the villain and the muse” of her story. Today, she says their relationship was “very toxic”, explaining: “My mom always remained very manipulative. She just knew where to hit me, and I would buckle and feel guilty and trapped.” Perry, who was born in Springfield, Massachusetts but grew up in San Diego, California, left home at 15. “I dropped out of school in the eighth grade,” she remembers. “My living conditions weren’t great.”

Her new album opens with a song about Balboa Park, where she lived for a time as a dreadlocked gutter punk. “I have the greatest memories from that park,” she says. “There would be the guy selling acid, a guy selling coke or crystal, a guy selling mushrooms. You would walk up, buy your drugs, and sit in the park. It was a loop, and it was almost like all of us were freaks in the zoo. People just drove around gawking at the punks and the mods and the queers and the gays and the drag queens. I was innocent, in a weird way.” She checks herself. “I was so not innocent, but there was an innocence about the situation.”

When she was 21, Perry moved up the coast to San Francisco, where she was spotted singing open mic and recruited by 4 Non Blondes bassist Christa Hillhouse. The band recorded “What’s Up?” for their debut album Bigger, Better, Faster, More!, but Perry was deeply unhappy with what producer David Tickle did with her song. She took matters into her own hands and re-recorded it herself. “That was the first thing I ever produced,” she says. “I took control of the situation, and magically, somehow, knew what to do.”

Perry was so convinced that her version would become a massive hit that she told the band’s record label they should save it for their second album. “I knew if we put it on our first record, it would overshadow us,” she says. “Everybody, at the label, the band and management, looked at me like I was insane. Suck it, motherf***ers, because I was right! I think the band would have lasted longer if we had done that, but now I’m glad it happened the way it happened.”

“What’s Up” continues to attract new fans in droves. It has been streamed over a billion times on Spotify, and almost 2 billion times on YouTube. “Every few years, somebody in the government is f***ing something up,” says Perry. “It’s an easy singalong, it’s rebellious and it’s about revolution. I wrote that song in 1990. Here we are in 2026, still asking: ‘What the f*** is going on in the world?’”

4 Non Blondes split in 1994, in the midst of recording their second album, with Perry determined to continue experimenting while her bandmates felt pressure to repeat their success. She released a couple of solo albums in the late 1990s, before her second career as a producer took off when she wrote “Get the Party Started”, a huge hit for Pink in 2001.

“I don’t want to sound like a d***, but ‘Get the Party Started’ was an experiment,” recalls Perry, explaining that it was the first thing she wrote after buying herself a synthesiser and a drum machine in an effort to understand chart music. “I grabbed a microphone and thought of every cliché I could: ‘Get the party started on a Saturday night…’ Soon I had a grin from f***ing here to f***ing Jupiter, like, I just wrote a f***ing dance hit!”

She followed that with the 2002 ballad “Beautiful”, which she wrote and considered giving to various singers before Christina Aguilera made it her own. Perry recalls that when they were recording it at her home studio, Aguilera brought a friend with her for company. Just before she started singing, she whispered to her friend: “Don’t look at me.” Perry knew instantly that she would keep the line on the single.

“I got goosebumps,” she remembers. “I said to myself, this is definitely her song. She is f***ed up, and this is hers. I knew it from that vulnerable moment. That’s exactly the kind of emotion that needed to be singing that song.” Released just a couple of months after Aguilera’s raunchy single “Dirrty”, the song radically overhauled her image, shattering preconceptions, topping charts around the world, and winning her a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. “I love that version,” says Perry. “It will always be a classic.”

I found a closure I never thought I would ever experience

Perry recorded her own performance of “Beautiful” for the first time for Let It Die Here. Although the rest of the album is made up of new songs inspired by her mother’s death, she realised “Beautiful” fitted alongside them. “It felt true to my story,” she says. “‘Beautiful’ is about vulnerability, and not feeling good enough, and not feeling special. That’s what my whole childhood was… How do I make my mom proud? When I put it on the album, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a transition.’ It’s my butterfly moment.”

As grief-stricken as some of the album is, it finds its way to peace and a measure of acceptance. Perry says that, in those last months caring for Marluce as she died, it was finally possible to have the mother-daughter relationship she’d always wanted. “That was a really incredible moment for me,” she says. “Freeing, and full circle, and a closure that I never thought I would ever experience.”

Perry is still juggling her many hats. Along with her new album and documentary, she has returned to the studio with 4 Non Blondes to belatedly record a second album, due later this year. That precious time she was able to spend nursing the mother she once ran from, and the unexpected sense of resolution she found in the final days of their relationship, helped her to find her way back to her voice.

“That’s why I say she’s my hero and my villain,” says Perry. “Without her, I probably wouldn’t be as strong, or a survivor. I definitely know I wouldn’t be where I am today, and I like where I’m going. I like who I’ve become.”

Linda Perry’s album ‘Let It Die Here’ is out now. The documentary will be in cinemas across the United States in May and in London on 21 June. Full list of screenings here.