Billboard Cover: -The Biggest Event of My Career- (GALLERY)
- kpexplore
- 30 gen 2015
- Tempo di lettura: 4 min
If Katy is nervous, she doesn't show. She's already 108 shows deep into the Prismatic World Tour. Most halftime artists use the performance as a mega-sized launch pad for whatever they have up next, but Perry says it will serve another purpose for her. "There isn't any selling point going up the day after," she says. "I'm just selling my music to the broadest, widest audience ever."
About Taylor Swift... she described a fellow female musician as her "straight-up enemy" who tried to "sabotage her entire arena tour." The next day Perry tweeted, "Watch out for the Regina George in sheep's clothing," a reference to Mean Girls that everyone took to be about Swift. Asked about it now, Perry only says, "If somebody is trying to defame my character, you're going to hear about it."
In any case, the Super Bowl gig is a major win in the Perry column. And not the only one: In 2014, she sold out more than 80 arenas, grossing more than $146 million, according to Billboard Boxscore, making Prismatic the biggest tour of the year by a female artist.
"Watching the rehearsals solidified our feeling that she's the right choice," says the NFL's Moll. "And we see the connection she has with her audience and her reach on social media." Says Charli XCX, who will be opening for Perry this spring: "She makes sugary, plastic pop so well, makes it sound smart and amazing. But she also has such a vision within her videos and her live show. I love that she goes all the way with it."
When she's working, Perry wakes up around noon, after at least nine hours of sleep. She checks The Huffington Post to see what's going on in the world and slips into the uniform she has worn for the last year: a black Adidas track suit with white stripes and matching slippers. But style isn't the point. "I'm just not playing the picture game," she says, referring to paparazzi. "If I wear the same thing every day, the pictures don't sell."
The rest of her early-afternoon routine involves physical therapy for her knees and some massage, acupuncture or cupping. "Sometimes I get a steam for my voice," she says. She also has a therapist she sees when she's in Los Angeles. "That's one of only a handful of people who see me as Katherine Hudson," Perry says.
Perry lives in what she calls "a compound" in L.A. with her older sister, Angela Hudson; Hudson's husband, Svend Lerche; and their baby. Her younger brother, David Hudson, lives nearby in Los Feliz and her parents, Keith Hudson and Mary Perry, are in Irvine, Calif. "Everybody is somewhat close," she says. "I always dreamed of living commune style. I want my own Neverland ranch at a some point, but not with the salacious parts." She cracks up.
Her dream? "My own Starbucks on the property," she says, only half-joking. "I have to create my own world because it's hard to go into the other world sometimes. Barbra Streisand has a mall downstairs in her basement -- just weird, amazing stuff like that. I get it, because it becomes such a thing to go out in the world."
"What I will say is that to have any relationship at this level you have to just be protective and figure out how to navigate it," she says. "There is no handbook." She thinks about it, and adds, "In all my relationships, I've learned how I have to be more careful and that it's not up for public consumption."
She also reached out to Bruno Mars, a buddy from awards shows, who had the halftime gig in 2014. (She insists she doesn't have many close celebrity friends -- she's probably tightest with Rihanna, Adele and Ellie Goulding.) She scans the email on her phone -- "let me just make sure it's kosh" -- before reading it out loud:
Hello, exclusive Super Bowl club member! I was wondering if you are in L.A. at all this month and would have tea with a sister who is about to throw up with nervousness re: [football emoji]. I've heard about your process through our managers, but am wondering if you had more insight on important things like, spray tan the night before or three nights before? JK, or maybe not!
"I'm going to meet up with him and he'll tell me whatever there is to tell," Perry says. "Although I don't know how much there really is." She knows that no matter how much she prepares, the halftime show is live, and as Janet Jackson and M.I.A. demonstrated, anything can happen. "You can't control other people, and hopefully they're on the same path with you," she says. "My special guests" -- including Lenny Kravitz -- "don't have any agenda other than the music. But you can never be too sure." Kravitz claims that he and Perry have been cooking up a surprise. "It's cool because it's different for me," he says. "Our voices are going to blend well together."
Perry's focused on the opportunity: Playing for an audience so vast that it will include some of the few remaining human beings who have never heard of her. What's her strategy to win them over? It's simple, Perry says: "I want the show to be quintessential Katy. It's like the exclamation point on the whole last cycle. This is the cherry on top of everything I've already done."
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