Rain Perry’s song Beautiful Tree became best known as the theme tune to the CW Network’s teen drama Life Unexpected.
Ten years later, she’s releasing her latest album.
Seated on her porch, in a remote part of Ventura County between Ojai and Santa Paula, it feels like a step back in time to being in the music mecca of Laurel Canyon in the 60s and 70s.
"I think it's important to me to live some place that's kind of wild. I've lived in the sticks for a long time and I like it!" she told KCLU.
Her new album – a White Album - tackles her own difficult questions about what it means to be white in America, inspired by the racial tensions in particular of the last two years.
"I was trying to write at the beginning of the pandemic and I was feeling stuck," she said.
"There was so much going on in the culture then. With George Floyd and Armaud Arbery and - Civil Rights has never stopped being a huge topic - but it was especially at the forefront right then," Perry said. "And these are the songs that came out. I just decided to take an honest look at my life and my background through the lens of race."
"My favorite songs are the ones that are personal. Like Bruce Springsteen writing about that one guy that lost his job, and not about economics," she told KCLU.
Perry’s first single certainly gets personal – sparked by a story told to her about her late mom – Melody – about a group of her childhood friends in the 1950s.
"And one of the kids was Black. Then she told me that this kid told her one day that she was in love with my mom and he was gonna marry her some day.
"I mean, they were like, nine years old.
"But this was at the same period of time as Emmett Till and what happened to him."
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store.
Perry said, "I thought about the risk he took having a crush on a white girl and did his mom have to have a conversation with him and that put me down this path."
Perry's new single, The Money, tackles the discriminatory real estate practice of red-lining.
"There were these racist housing policies where they drew lines around different neighborhoods and wouldn't lend, based on race," she explained.
She said she believes there's a collective responsibility to address discrimination in America.
"The policies of the past are an ongoing accident scene, in some ways, so when you see it - you have to do something about it.
"That's why these questions of, 'Well did my ancestors own slaves or not?' That's not the right question.
"'What can I do now?' That's the right question," she said.
The White Album is released April 15, and her singles Melody and Jack and The Money are out now.
