Katy Perry does Blender (November 2008)

14 Oct

American singer-songwriter Katy Perry is on the cover of Blender, November 2008 issue. The 23-year-old glamour obsessive behind the year’s most divisive No.1 smash doesn’t seem to care what you think – as long as you’re paying attention to ger every fabolous move.

These days, she’s the 23-year-old pop starlet behind “I Kissed a Girl,” the song that spent most of the summer at No. 1. She grew up born-again in Santa Barbara, California, with two pastors for parents. She began her musical career as Katy Hudson (her original surname) when she was just 17. Her first album, in 2001, had a song called “Growing Pains”: “I’m grateful to be part of the family tree/While the Man upstairs does his work on me.” One of the Boys is most famous for a song that goes, “I kissed a girl/And I liked it.” Sunrise, sunset.

Perry has a Jesus tattoo on her left wrist she got when she was 18. “I see it every time I’m playing guitar,” she says. “It’s looking back up at me. That’s where I come from, and probably where I’m going back to.”

She grew up with an older sister and younger brother in her parents’ ministry—“Evangelical, with a heavy Pentecostal flavor”—in a world of Christian school, Christian camp and church several times a week. “It was kind of an island,” she remembers. “We spoke in tongues. We knew there was this one way, and all the other ways were wrong.” In Perry’s house, deviled eggs were called angeled eggs. “I didn’t know enough to ask my mom, ‘How come we call them that? Everybody else calls them something else.’”

What she also didn’t know was that her parents hadn’t always been on the side of the angels. Both her mom and dad had their own rock & roll days, before they were born again. As Perry says proudly, “In terms of wild youth, they put me to shame.” Her mom grew up a debutante in Southern California, then ran off to see the world, with a tempestuous first marriage in Zimbabwe. She also briefly dated Jimi Hendrix in Spain. “He just came up to her in a club and picked her out.” Her dad was a West Coast scenester in the ’60s. “He was like a male Penny Lane,” Perry says, referring to the Almost Famous role that made a star out of another girl named Kate Hudson. He was an acid dealer who palled around with Timothy Leary and specialized in a potent strain of LSD called Strawberry Fields.

When Perry hit her teens, she began going out drinking. That’s when she found out about her parents’ wild hippie days. “I started spending Sunday mornings crying and hung over,” she says. “Because crying is what you do when you’re hung over. So my dad started telling me about when he was my age.” His testimony—the story of his past and his conversion—offered an example of how she could put her life right. She’s protective of her parents’ beliefs, even if she doesn’t share them anymore: “They found God at a time when they really needed to, and I believe in the God they found. My dad would have died from one tab of Strawberry Fields too many if he hadn’t found God.”