Katy Perry has revealed that her upcoming single, Watch It Burn, nearly never saw the light of day, telling Apple Music's Zane Lowe that she spent months convincing herself she would never release it.
The American singer, songwriter and television personality sat down with Lowe on The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music ahead of the track's release on June 25, opening up about the personal turmoil that shaped it, the resurgence of her 2010 hit The One That Got Away, and more.
The 41-year-old described the past year as simultaneously the hardest and the most rewarding of her life. "Last year was so hard. It was the worst year and the best year," she told Lowe. "Because there's two sides to every coin, and I decided to look at it as the best."
She recalled exactly where she was a year earlier, performing on her Lifetimes tour. "Last year, June, I was in the winter on the Lifetimes tour. I was crying. I was in Adelaide. I had just separated. I had been through a lot of you know, just stuff publicly, privately. And I was just like, holy s**t, this is really intense." She added that, against all odds, things had since turned around: "And then my blessing came and it was wonderful. It was like God didn't take me this far to desert me."
That emotional upheaval fed directly into Watch It Burn, which Perry wrote in March of the previous year alongside Justin Tranter and several other collaborators, alongside a second track called Band-Aids. Both songs, she said, cut close to the bone.
"I wrote two songs, Band-Aids and Watch It Burn, and I was terrified of putting Watch It Burn out," she said. "I was a little scared of putting Band-Aids out because they're so honest and they really tell a lot about my story." For a long stretch afterwards, she insisted she would shelve the track entirely: "I'm never putting this out. I'm never putting this out. I'm never putting this out."
Her change of heart, she told Lowe, arrived unexpectedly during a hot yoga session. She went on to reflect on years of suppressing that emotion: "I've kind of swallowed it or pushed it down or just gone on to love and light or taken the high road and now it's like, I can do love and light and shut the f*ck up."
Releasing the song, she hopes, might give others permission to do the same: "If I can be brave enough to share my story and put out something that feels really personal to me, maybe someone else can feel like they can feel their own anger as well."
Perry also touched on the unexpected renewed popularity of The One That Got Away, a single from her 2010 album, Teenage Dream, and how revisiting her earlier catalogue has coincided with a broader sense of returning to her roots.