She Kissed a Girl, Now What?
Maniac Magazine: Ok, so how’d you think of the song?
KATY PERRY: Well, “I Kissed A Girl” was an idea that actually popped into my head. You know, I’d always heard about artists having a notepad on the side of their bed or something they can record if they were to have dreams of lyrics or an idea for a song in the middle of the night and I thought it was all bollocks. I thought that never really happened but it actually happened to me. I woke up one morning and I was starting my day and I had this song literally pop into my head, the chorus of it, “I kissed a girl and I liked it; the taste of her cherry chapstick; I kissed a girl just to try it out; my boyfriend don’t mind it.”
And so I had all that kind of pop into my head and I thought, what a peculiar little idea, and I knew it spawned from some curiosity that I had growing up but it was one of those things where I had this idea. I put it in my back pocket for a while and I kind of presented it a couple of times to different people and they didn’t really understand it fully. I thought, well okay, so that was just like a fluke accident of an idea and nothing will ever happen with that. Until, at the end of my record-making process, literally the last two days that were in the studio. I had this idea still and it wouldn’t go away so it was a pebble in my shoe, and I just decided, okay, well maybe since it’s still so prevalent in the back of my mind after a year and a half of dreaming it up, I should probably finish this song.
MM: And the second most obvious question: If you could kiss one female celebrity and like it, who would it be?
KP: Well that question has been asked probably as many times as the question of “Have you ever really kissed a girl?” so I guess to give you two questions in one answer: yes, everybody, I have kissed a girl. I know you’re chuckling right now and that was a bonus question. And I don’t know; I really kind of stopped telling everybody who I thought was hot because it becomes next day’s news of like, ‘Holy shit, she wants to make out with Scarlett Johansson,’ and I’m like, well not really. I was just kind of answering their question because she is hot and we all know it so I… it takes a certain beautiful, I guess, mermaid.
MM: Who or what has influenced your style the most?
KP: Well, I mean it’s a bit of a concoction of different things. I mean when I first started out, I was really attracted to having my own sense of style because I started swing dancing, lindy hop and jitterbug. I would go to the Santa Barbara rec hall and I would learn how to dance there and I would be taught by some of the more seasoned dancers who were actually very involved in the scene. You know, it was kind of like… a little bit like rockabilly but not as annoying. And these girls would get out of their old vintage Cadillacs with their pencil skirt and their tight little cardigans and their bullet bras and I thought it was so unique and different than what was going in 2000 or whatever the time frame was there.
And I think my style has grown a lot; it’s changed. I love details. I love different colors. I love funny things… And I like to make people laugh. I love a good sense of humor in clothes. I also love to kind of dress up and be very adult sometimes. I guess you would say it’s a mixture between like Dita Von Teese and Agyness Deyn. Dita Von Teese is just one of the most beautifully graceful women that exists. Like, she’s a woman. And then Agyness Deyn is kind of just like a punk rock Lolita and I love both of those mixed together.
MM: As the now proud celibate girl…
KP: By the way, that was a joke and any fine journalist would have got that joke and inserted that in the article’s context. I’m not going to be celibate.
MM: You’re not?
KP: No. I mean, I guess I’m just going to be looking for the right one but please, celibacy for a whole year? I’d rather die. But that’s just how the media works, you know. I’m like a continual prankster and a jokester and people forget that you have to like… you have to interpret that if I’m telling a joke.
MM: Where are you at in terms of thinking about your next album?
KP: Well I think I still want to make a pop record. I want to make maybe a sonically, more current pop record. I want to make people move a little bit more and, yes, I’m still driving along on the pop freeway of life. In the farther future, I definitely want to make an acoustic record. I want to try lots of different things. Why not?
MM: What’s it like to suddenly within the past nine months be thrown into the world of being a famous pop star, how your life has changed, and where do you hope it takes you?
KP: You know, I was really gearing up for it. I was preparing to catch my lucky star and hold on tightly… But I think my whole intent was just to get as many people that would want to listen just to listen. And so now that they’re all listening, it’s exciting, and I’m just trying to continually make good music and hopefully take my career to the next level in life. I think when you have the opportunity to do big, great things you should definitely take advantage of the opportunity.
MM: You mentioned that “Thinking Of You” is your next single. Your previous singles up until now have been sort of up-tempo or brash. This is more of a power ballad. Are you excited or nervous to see how the public responds to your first power ballad out there on the radio?
KP: I’m really excited. I think it’s a grower, not a shower… “Thinking Of You” to me is something that you want to listen to the lyrics and hear the storyline of. It’s very, very important to me because I’m now showing the different kind of side of me. I started playing open mike nights with my guitar, playing coffee houses and things like that, and so while I was playing those really intimate places, I wrote the song, “Thinking of You.” And it’s a very regretful song about a relationship that ended that I really didn’t know how to end, like I didn’t know how to move on. When you end a relationship, sometimes you are still very much in love but you just know. You look into the future and you know that that isn’t the right missing piece to the puzzle. Although it was a really nice puzzle, it just wasn’t the missing piece.
And so it talks about how when you’re moving on, you meet other people but you’re still in love. And the chorus kind of speaks for itself. It says, “When I’m with him I’m thinking of you.” And I think that is a very honest statement that a lot of people probably have been through but they would never tell their old significant other. And it’s exciting to play that live in the show as well, because I get to play that just me on my acoustic guitar and kind of strip down. There’s no production to it. It’s just the basic spine of the song.
MM: So in light of all the hubbub with the gay and lesbian community over several of your songs, do you think every girl should try kissing another girl?
KP: I don’t know. I think to each their own. I think, you know, some say to-may-to, some say to-mah-to.
