Rest in peace usually shows up once, at the bottom of a headstone or the end of a eulogy. Linda Perry turns it into a chorus on “Let It Die Here,” the title track from her new album, and repeats it until the phrase works like a command.
The song is built like a church service. It opens by calling on a holy mother and closes with God as witness, and in between Perry works through a confession. The deceivers come first: a fortune teller, a grifter seated on a trickster’s throne, a spider speaking to a fly. That last one comes from Mary Howitt’s 1829 poem “The Spider and the Fly,” in which a spider flatters a fly into its parlor and eats it. The second verse then takes the line Catholics traditionally use to open confession with a priest and swaps in a new listener: “Forgive me, lover, for I have been.” The sins she goes on to describe belong to the lover, a darkness she got lost inside.
The penance is brutal. She drinks black water from a demon’s cup, fights a monster with a child’s sword, wins the stab and loses the war, and licks her wounds while deception keeps running through her veins. Perry fronted 4 Non Blondes and spent the decades since shaping songs for P!nk, Christina Aguilera, Adele and Alicia Keys, and here she keeps the confession for herself.
The final verse clears the altar of secrets, guilt, blame, fury and games. She falls like a bird and catches the wind on the way down, and with God as her witness, the healing begins. What gets buried in this service is the lie, and Perry walks out of the church on her own two feet.
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