Inside the Studio, hosted by Rolling Stone contributing editor Joe Levy, features intimate and revealing conversations with musicians and artists who are on the verge of releasing new material. No one fits that bill better than Katy Perry; not only is her fifth album, Smile, about to come out, she’ll also be introducing the world to her daughter with fiancé Orlando Bloom very soon (she jokes that she’s in her “fourth trimester”). Joe has a candid conversation with her about the themes of her new record, how she feels about her impending motherhood, her troubling period of depression, the therapy retreat that changed her life, and what she thinks the future holds.
The record was originally going to come out in June, but continued to be pushed; Joe wonders why she didn’t just push it to 2021, as so many other things have been. “I know my world is about to shift and expand in such an incredible way,” she says. “I know my next couple of years are going to be so full, and I’m going to have so much to say,” so why wait to release this one when she wants to get to work on the next one? She also says the record is about “hopefulness and resilience, and coming out of the darkness,” so maybe it can be a light for anyone going through something like that right now. “The sequence of the songs does tell a mini-story” about her going through a very dark time, and then having to make the choice to change something because “otherwise I’m not going to make it to the next year….or the next day.” Joe asks to hear more about that, and she admits that she was having intensely dark thoughts: “I had a CNN news ticker of negativity that was just going through my mind” all the time, she says, and “those voices were getting too loud.”
But the album, like Katy herself, gets brighter: She had Orlando, and her team of 15 years, to lean on for support, and she went to a therapy retreat called the Hoffman Process (“It’s like ten years of therapy in one week,” she says) to learn how to quiet the negative thoughts that were causing her so much pain. She learned to let go of a lot of things that weren’t serving her. She feels “more grounded, and more expansive” than ever. So what’s next for her? “Whatever I want,” she says simply. “Honestly. I’ll do it as it comes….Planning is future, you know? Sometimes you just need to be present.” Listen to the episode for deep dives into the songs on the new album, how much American Idol means to her, how things stand between her and Taylor Swift, and much more on Inside The Studio.
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