Every young person goes through an awkward phase on the way to adulthood; leave it to Katy Perry to go through an awkward phase so goddamn poised and adorable that we actually physically can’t stand it.
In the heady, pre-9/11 era when pop was a more wholesome place and the cell phones were enormous, Perry was going by the name Katy Hudson, and trying to make it as an Alanis-lite Christian rock singer.
A just-released video from the time shows a 16-year-old, pre-fame Perry on one of her first tours, joking about her “pizza face”, performing angsty Christian rock numbers and getting way too excited about Survivor.
Perry’s first, self-titled album, released around the time this footage was shot, flopped hard, notoriously selling fewer than 200 copies and leading her to reinvent herself as a secular artist.
It was one of several false starts, and if you wanted, you could probably spend a whole day trawling through the fascinating world of early Katy Perry recordings on YouTube.
Listen to a few of these and the bizarre “one pop song for you, one incredibly angsty rock ballad for me” structure of Perry’s albums will start to make a bunch more sense.
