Linda Perry Reflects on Her 'Hard Time' in 4 Non Blondes: 'Walking Away from All of It Was No Big Deal' (Exclusive)

The singer-songwriter opens up to PEOPLE about the whirlwind that was her early fame after the success of "What's Up?"

Lester Cohen/Getty Linda Perry performing in 4 Non Blondes in Los Angeles ca. 1990

• Linda Perry admits she "had a hard time" in 4 Non Blondes
• "I wasn’t clear on the kind of music I wanted to do yet," she tells PEOPLE
• The singer-songwriter's documentary recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival

Linda Perry may have had a massive hit in 4 Non Blondes with “What’s Up?” but stepping away from the group was not a difficult decision.

The singer-songwriter, 59, opens up to PEOPLE in this week’s issue about her early days of fame, and the ways in which she struggled to find her footing in a space that often made her uncomfortable.

Perry — whose new documentary Linda Perry: Let It Die Here premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on June 6 —co-founded 4 Non Blondes in San Francisco in the late 1980s with bassist Christa Hillhouse, guitarist Shaunna Hall and drummer Wanda Day.

Their first and only album, Bigger, Better, Faster, More!, came out in 1992, and contained the enduring hit “What’s Up?” But the lead-up to the song’s release was wracked with tension; the band’s label had made them record an arrangement of the song that Perry didn’t like. She went behind their backs and did it her way, recording her original composition — and her way was a hit.

“I knew from then on out, ‘You’re going to have to constantly be surviving here if you’re going to be alive,’” she says. “I had a hard time in the band; not because of them, because I wasn’t clear on the kind of music I wanted to do yet. I was just really finding myself.”

Fryderyk Gabowicz/picture alliance via Getty 4 Non Blondes (L-R Dawn Richardson, Louis Metoyer, Linda Perry, Christa Hillhouse) in 1993

Because she was so new to the industry, Perry still had plenty to learn — and doing that while balancing rising fame proved difficult.

“I’m figuring out all this stuff as we’re getting platinum records and playing to 80,000 people,” she says. “That’s why it was so easy for me to walk away — because I know what it’s like being down. Being at the bottom is easy breezy. I know how to climb. I’m a great climber. So to me, walking away from all of it was no big deal.”

After leaving 4 Non Blondes in 1994 (“We don’t talk much at all,” she says of her former bandmates), Perry released the solo album In Flight in 1996, and After Hours three years later.

By the early 2000s, she’d established herself as a go-to hitmaker for stars like Pink, Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani.

Theo Wargo/Getty Linda Perry at the premiere of her documentary in New York City on June 6, 2024

“It was fun,” Perry says of her work at the time. “I went from writing with the Dixie Chicks to playing with Jonathan [Davis] from Korn. I had all different styles of music that lived in me. I was exploring.”

Perry’s rise to fame will get the silver screen treatment in her new documentary, in which she also speaks candidly on her difficult upbringing and the healing that eventually came shortly before her mother’s death, the joys of parenting her 9-year-old Rhodes and her 2021 breast cancer diagnosis.

“I am really finally enjoying this person I’m becoming,” Perry says. “I’ve always had this thing where I just want to be the best. So much f---ing pressure to be the best. But now I’m like, I just want to be the best at who I am. And that takes a lot of pressure off. I don’t want to be f---ing Superman. I don’t want to save the world. I just want to save the people I can, and I want to be the best person that I am.”

For more on Linda Perry, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere now.

Read the original article on People.