Susie Anderson
Staff Writer
Celebrating a long-awaited return to country music, The Band Perry will perform at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater.
Siblings Kimberly Perry, Reid Perry and Neil Perry formed their group with their self-titled debut album in 2010, with singles including “If I Die Young,” “Better Dig Two” and more. “If I Die Young” is nine-times platinum, won 2011 CMA Single of the Year and Song of the Year awards, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Country Song and topped both the Billboard Hot Country Songs and Hot AC charts. The group has sold more than 2.5 million albums and 12 million singles and reached more than 1 billion streams.
The group received Best New Artist Grammy in 2012 and Best Country Duo/Group Performance in 2015.
When writing their breakout single, “If I Die Young,” Kimberly Perry told American Songwriter magazine in 2023 that she was inspired by Anne of Green Gables.
“There’s this scene of her in the book and the movie where she is lying in a canoe that she was pretending was her watery casket and she was reciting a Tennyson poem,” she said in the interview, “and I always found that scene so beautiful.”
Imagining her own funeral and the reactions of those closest to her, Kimberly Perry said she imagined the beauty and sadness at the same time.
“As I look back over a decade later, I think I was hedging my bets a little bit,” she told American Songwriter. “I have big dreams, but they don’t come true and I guess that’s OK. It’s been really cool to see how that validated a lot of people’s feelings in that moment, when they just couldn’t quite see that far into the future.”
In early 2023, the band announced on social media that they “decided to take a creative break as a group and each focus on our individual creative pursuits.”
Kimberly Perry debuted her solo EP Bloom and subsequent album Superbloom with the lead single “If I Die Young Pt. 2.” Neil Perry launched his solo career with a debut single “If You Can’t, Don’t.”
Fifteen years after the release of their debut solo album, the group announced their comeback to country music. On July 17, 2025, the band re-signed with Big Machine Label Group, where they first began. The band returned with Kimberly, singing lead vocals and guitar, Reid — playing bass guitar — plus Kimberly’s husband, Johnny Costello, who will play mandolin and guitar.
“We’ve been on hiatus for a few years and we are coming back in full force and (‘If I Die Young’) is really that song that continues to go like, ‘Hey, remember that beautiful thing that we did, you want to keep playing it night after night and then write some more to come and compliment it for this next decade?’ ” Perry told the Grand Ole Opry, “and it feels like the greatest honor of our life.”
