Kimberly Perry, the lead singer for The Band Perry, had been divorced for about two years when she met Johnny Costello, who played with a Dallas punk quartet, Crystal Rippers, in October 2020.
“The joke,” says Costello, a former stand-up comic, “is I met Kimberly on Friday, and she met me on Saturday.”
“I had had too many martinis on Friday night,” she confesses.
Perry was notably smitten. She admitted within the first 24 hours that she was having a hard time not saying “I love you” to Costello, though she barely knew him. Many men would have run, but her intensity didn’t scare him off. Eight months later, they got engaged, and in short order, they climbed into a black Corvette and drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to get married at midnight, waiting six months to reveal it publicly.
So when Perry heard “Psychological,” a song about a love that borders on unhealthy obsession, during a 2025 pitch session, she flashed back to their elopement, and to an overwhelming crush she had on a boy in high school.
“As the narrator and storyteller of this song,” she notes, “I definitely have related to it in many seasons in my life.”
So has Grace Tyler, the independent country singer for whom “Psychological” was originally written. She’d previously recorded a song titled “She Wasn’t Crazy,” in which her character threatened to slash her ex’s tires, sink his boat and set his boots on fire, a chain of thoughts that, she surmises, “almost sounds psycho.” Thus, when “Psychological” came up during a cowriting session last year at SMACK on Nashville’s Music Row, she was all in.
“At the time, there was this guy I met on Valentine’s Day, and when I say I found his mom’s Facebook – all the things – like, I was head over heels for this guy,” she remembers. “He ended up just being a loser. But at the time, he was super cool. And so I was like, ‘Well, let’s just kind of play off of that.’ And so, yeah, the lyric definitely came from a little bit of inspiration.”
The original “Psychological” inspiration belonged to Colton Venner (“Never Call Again”), who’d gone through about two years of rejection over it. The hook split the title into two words, something about making “psycho logical,” and he had a couple of other pairings – including “crazy” and “rational” – to further illustrate it. He’d offered it up in about two dozen previous writing sessions, and been rebuffed in each of them.
“I was starting to think it was bad idea,” he reflects.
Venner was having a pretty good day when they wrote “Psychological.” His son had taken his first steps, he shared a video with Tyler and co-writer Clara Park (“No Tellin’”), and they toasted with a shot of whiskey at 11:00 a.m. And in this instance, the room was receptive to the idea, “You make goin’ psycho logical.” After they batted it around for a bit, Park recalled a Julia Michaels pop song, “All Your Exes,” in which a woman becomes psycho-level possessive. Michaels’ song started calm but broke into something more… well … crazy.
Park started playing a semi-classical piano part in 6/8 time, and it would evolve into frantic obsession. The opening image finds the woman doing a deep dive on Nirvana – not because she likes the band, but because she wants to impress the new boyfriend. Tyler had done that very thing, and the reference fit the song’s vibe.
“The lyrics in the grunge-rock bands in the ‘90s, there’s some pretty prolific and sometimes pretty dark stuff in there,” Venner says.
They intentionally built the woman’s codependence one plank at a time, and as she sank further into a delusional morass, the chorus came to its expected conclusion: “Boy, you make going psycho logical.” After they hit the hook, they tacked on more lines with appropriately off-kilter phrasing, ultimately repeating the money line again after doubling the length of the chorus.
“We were like, ‘Do we wrap it up here, or do we keep going?’ And we just decided to keep going,” Park recalls. “Lyrically, we wanted to elaborate on it a little bit more. And musically, it just felt right to keep building it.”
Before verse two was over, the singer contemplated murdering someone if infidelity interfered in the relationship. As they approached the end, they inserted a bridge that played off the unsettled nature of the protagonist: “All my hinges/ Are off the wall.”
“Colton’s so funny in a room,” Tyler says. “He likes to be up and moving, and so he literally was standing at the door, and I remember staring at him, and he’s like, playing with the door in Clara’s studio, and I’m just looking at the hinges going, ‘He’s about to swing this door off the wall.’ And I was like, ‘What if it’s “All the hinges are off the wall”?’”
The demo represented their intentions well, with a formal piano offering arpeggios in the opening frame before it broke into stabbing guitars at the first chorus. Tyler and her team weren’t convinced that it fit her next project, so they allowed publishers to pitch it around. Concord Music VP of A&R Melissa Spillman presented “Psychological” during a 10-hour series of pitch sessions with TBP and Big Machine executive VP of A&R Allison Jones, and they all thought it ideal for TBP’s newest chapter.
“What it takes to be a Band Perry song, really, are the contradictions of those two worlds,” Perry says. “You start out sweet and become a little unhinged.”
Perry wanted to make it a little more dramatic – she adjusted one line to suggest that she’d fake her death just to gain the man’s attention, and changed the chorus set-up to insist “I don’t need no hospital.”
“It all really helped the song,” Park says, “and I feel like it even made it better in the long run.”
Still, Perry had her doubts about the piano foundation when they took the song into Nashville’s Blackbird Studios, though producer Dann Huff (Kane Brown, Keith Urban) insisted she was over-thinking it. They ultimately doubled the piano with ganjo in the back half of the first verse, making it more TBP-like and hinting at the song’s emotional weirdness.
“Kimberly didn’t want the piano to sound too pristine,” Huff says. “She wanted it to sound distressed, kind of like distressed wood, you know, something that was a bit damaged, which makes sense when you think about the lyric.”
Steel guitarist Justin Schipper played a solo with George Harrison-like tones that sounded bent next to the psycho storyline, and guitarist Kris Donegan dropped in some heavy chording that twisted the sound even further.
“Kris’s tones, when I’m listening to that, it’s like this country band with a guitar player that never quit playing for Ozzy Osbourne,” Huff says.
During the vocal sessions, Huff had Perry and Costello layer in thick call-and-answer harmonies on the bridge that added to the hazy, unbalanced emotional tone.
Nashville Harbor released “Psychological” to country radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 11. It re-entered Billboard’s Country Airplay chart dated March 28 at No. 57.
“Even though it’s such a big, bombastic song, it’s really confessing devotion and letting that tie into delusion,” Perry says. “And isn’t that what love is, after all? Just a combo of the two?”
Costello, who’s being introduced to TBP fans with a single founded on “psycho” emotions, is comfortable with the message, too.
“I grew up with three sisters,” he says. “I’ve been dealing with mental health my whole life.”
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