Christina Perri has always had big feelings. In her 20s, she ran with those big feelings, letting her emotions more or less dictate the direction of her songwriting. It paid off, too, following the intensity of her feelings. Her debut single “Jar of Hearts” became a six-time platinum certified track and beloved pop ballad. Just a few months later, Perri released the even more successful “A Thousand Years” for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 soundtrack. Today, though, things have changed for Perri. She’s a few years wiser, she’s got a few more releases to her name, and she’s a mother now. Perri just doesn’t have time to pack a bag and run away with big feelings anymore. But she still feels them.
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So, Perri sits with her intense emotions and tinkers at their meaning and their message. Once an intense spark of emotion strikes, she grabs an instrument and gets to work. “That’s how I have become a songwriter,” Perri tells American Songwriter. “I’ve also learned over time, and as a songwriter progressing in my craft, I’ve learned to go and dig deeper and deeper and deeper. And if I’m not feeling better, I haven’t hit the core of that emotion yet. I have to keep singing about it until I feel better, which I think is the magical thing about songwriting.
“So I feel like I’m just always chasing the healing now,” Perri continues. “Whereas before, I used to just be like this open wound … and now I want to heal, I want to write about it, and I want to move forward.”
Moving forward for Perri meant writing a new album that took several years to curate. The album—A Lighter Shade of Blue which dropped June 24—was also the first original studio album that Perri penned since her 2014 album Head or Heart.
“It feels, honestly, better than any other album I’ve put out because I spent the longest time making it,” Perri says of A Lighter Shade of Blue. “I never imagined I’d be one of those people that literally spent six years making an album, but I also had so much life going on in the middle. Between becoming a mom and then, you know, going through miscarriage and loss and then also going through the pandemic … these past [few] years have been crazy for everyone.”
The ups and downs thrown at her inspired Perri to find solace in her craft. And while processing her emotions through A Lighter Shade of Blue, Perri paused to release two cover albums for her daughters, Carmella and Rosie. Songs for Carmella: Lullabies & Sing-a-Longs was released in 2019, and then in 2021, Perri released Songs for Rosie. Rosie was Perri’s child who was “born silent,” or stillborn. By honoring both her living and late daughters, Perri was able to traverse through her emotions and emerge stronger.
“I realized that as a 35-year-old, pain is something [that can take you] to the dark side or you can use it to get better in some capacity,” Perri reflects.
Taking her reflection into a lighter—pun intended—direction, Perri explained her perspective via the Enneagram personality test. The Enneagram is a nine-category personality test with each personality being defined by different strengths and weaknesses. Each type is labeled with a number, and Perri, rather matter-of-factly states that she is a Four. The Four personality type is defined as “The Individualist,” and those who identify as Fours are typically sensitive, introspective, and expressive. Perri explains that, for her, this personality type manifests as “very melancholy” and “very blue.”
“The way I describe the Enneagram to anyone is that every number is like a color, and there’s a million different shades of color. So you’re not like in a box necessarily, but you have this tint about you,” she says.
Thus, the Enneagram had given Perri the words to describe her path. “I felt at peace about being who I am for the very first time,” Perri says of her Enneagram research. “And so when I wrote A Lighter Shade of Blue … I decided that it was going to be all the shades of the grief, the sadness, just like the pain that I had endured the past couple of years that have actually enlightened me. [It] had made me a lighter version of myself because I decided it was going to be so.”
Each song on A Lighter Shade of Blue consequently deals with varying topics. “It has to do with surrender,” Perri explains. “There’s a song about postpartum depression, there’s a song about death, there’s a song about marriage, there’s a song about raising a daughter. I mean, it’s like everything you could think of, I have. On the whole scale of emotions, I think I’ve really got them all there. I don’t feel like I’ve skipped over anything. But they’re all these shades of blue that I’m sharing with everyone.”
On the album, there’s the baby blue song “time of our lives,” the sky blue of “home,” the cobalt blue of “evergone,” and the navy color of the cornerstone track “blue.” There’s also the royal blue of Perri’s collaboration with pop/rock singer/songwriter Ben Rector, “back in time,” which Perri wrote with her husband in mind. But don’t take our word for it—listen to all of the shades of blue on Perri’s A Lighter Shade of Blue, and see for yourself.
Photo by Ashley Osborne
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