P!nk wasn’t songwriter Linda Perry’s first choice to record 2001's “Get the Party Started."
“I sent it to Madonna and she passed,” Perry told Rolling Stone. “A week later Alecia called. “She left me this really crazy message how she would come find me if I didn’t call her back. I had just written 'Get the Party Started’ and I go, ‘Well, I’ve got something I wrote last week,’ and sent it to her.
“I guess she sent it to [executive] LA Reid and they said, ‘Okay we have our first single.’”
The track, released in October 2001, was included on P!nk’s sophomore album Missundaztood. It peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and at No. 11 in Canada – and earned a Grammy Award nomination.
Perry said the song was “kind of a joke.”
She explained: “I was just having fun. I picked up a microphone and said, ‘I’m just going to say every clichéd line I can think of.’ And I came up with, ‘Get the party started on a Saturday night’ and wrote a bunch of stuff down.
“I called up my manager afterwards and said, ‘I just wrote a damn hit.’ It was too easy.”