Author, speaker and poet Jackie Hill Perry announced today that she was returning to music after signing a new deal with Christian hip-hop label Reach Records and dropping her debut single with the label, “First Draft.”
“It feels like a cool opportunity to get back into something I really enjoy, but from a different place,” Perry told RELEVANT. “I’m a different person than I was the last time I made music. Now, as a 34-year-old woman with four children, married for 10 years, with more theology, more life experience, and more suffering, I think the music will benefit from the life stage I’m in.”
This isn’t the first time Perry’s released music. She released her debut album The Art of Joy in 2014 on Humblebeast and released her second album, Crescendo, in 2018. She stepped away from music to focus on writing books and speaking, but she’s eager to step back into the music scene.
“I always enjoyed music; I missed it,” she said. “It was probably last year that I started to lament that I wasn’t able to make music. It was never a financial thing for me. It was just that I like music and I like to create it. But it was just a thing that I let go.”
Perry also shared that she’s also eager to explore a new sound, something fans haven’t heard from her yet.
“My intention will be to create a sound that is more native to me,” she explained. “My previous albums were more hip-hop-oriented and lyrical. I’m still going to be lyrical, but I think there’s a vibe and a southern countryness to my sound that I hadn’t explored before.”
She continued, “That’s kind of what I’m on: how do I make music that sounds good, feels good and produces good works? That will be the goal.”
Listen to her new single, “First Draft,” here:
