Kimberly Perry Suffered a Miscarriage Before Recording ‘If I Die Young Pt. 2′
Kimberly Perry recounts her difficult road to motherhood in a new mini-documentary that centers around "If I Die Young" and its follow-up sequel song, the recently released "If I Die Young Pt. 2."
In the five-and-a-half-minute video, Perry says that shortly before she wrote the "Pt. 2" version of the song, she suffered a pregnancy loss.
"I had actually just gone through a miscarriage a few months before, which was a really sad time," the singer details. "So in writing the second verse, it was like, 'Well, I would really love to set this intention that there is a baby coming, a healthy baby who's gonna be here at some point."
That second verse traces three generations of a family, and finds Perry straddled between her love for her mother and her hope to pass down her legacy to a child of her own one day.
"I'm looking more like my mother / I love her to the bone / I know it's gonna kill me on the day she goes home," Perry sings. "I'll pour some holy water on a daughter of my own / I'll pass my name down 'fore it's on a headstone..."
That sentiment is a fitting, full-circle update to the original "If I Die Young," in which Perry imagines the possibility of dying while she's still too young for all her dreams to come true. In the revisited version, Perry is older, with a lot more life under her belt, and her perspective has a renewed appreciation for everything that's happened in her life thus far — and an even deeper desire to live to see the days ahead.
The creation of "Pt. 2" was inextricably tied up with her dream of starting a family, Perry goes on to recount.
"It felt like it really held hands with the original version, because the entire original version was sort of this romantic plea for all the things that I was hoping for," she says. "A few months after we recorded the song, I found out I was pregnant."
"If I Die Young Pt. 2" comes off of Perry's upcoming EP, Bloom, which will arrive on June 9. In April, the singer also announced that she and her husband Johnny Costello are expecting their first child, a baby boy, who is due in late August.