Pop goddess Katy Perry appears on the cover of the February 2014 Love! Sex! Madness! issue of GQ US.
Writer Amy Wallace catches up with the most-followed person on Twitter (49 million followers) moments before she goes full geisha at the American Music Awards.
“I was thinking about unconditional love, and I was thinking: Geishas are basically, like, the masters of loving unconditionally,” she tells Wallace. They discuss her rise to stardom – and everything from ex Russell Brand and boyfriend John Mayer to her au naturel body and her relationship with Obama.
See below for more highlights from the interview, and go to GQ.com for the whole interview.
Perry, on praying for big boobs:
"I lay on my back one night and looked down at my feet, and I prayed to God. I said, God, will you please let me have boobs so big that I can't see my feet when I'm lying down?" At age 11, "God answered my prayers," she said, glancing south. "I had no clue they would fall into my armpits eventually."
...on weed:
"The weed- I'm not friends with it. I can't do that stuff. I'd be like in the corner: 'Are you trying to kill me?!' "
...on dating John Mayer:
“I think that I needed to grow up.” She stresses that they’re just dating. “I’m just having a wonderful experience with a wonderful guy. There’s no rush.”
...on believing in aliens… and her relationship with Obama:
“I see everything through a spiritual lens,” she says. “I believe in a lot of astrology. I believe in aliens. I look up into the stars and I imagine: How self-important are we to think that we are the only life-form? I mean, if my relationship with Obama gets any better, I’m going to ask him that question. It just hasn’t been appropriate yet.”
Relationship with Obama?
“I might have won Wisconsin for him,” she says. “Actually, I didn’t do too much, but he called on me a couple of times. Which was very nice.”
…on her au naturel body:
“I’ve never had any plastic surgery,” she says proudly. “Not a nose, not a chin, not a cheek, not a tit. So my messages of self-empowerment are truly coming from an au naturel product.”
…on Japan and her geisha-inspired performance at the American Music Awards:
She calls (Japan) “the capital of adorableness” and she thinks the theme fits the song she’s about to sing, “Unconditionally,” which she wrote for Mayer the last time they broke up. “I was thinking about unconditional love, and I was thinking: Geishas are basically, like, the masters of loving unconditionally.”
(Writer Amy Wallace notes: “She’s so earnest, I don’t have the heart to point out that in the gamut of human interactions, the courtesan-patron relationship is, um, maybe the most conditional relationship there is?”)
…on her AMA critics:
“All I was trying to do is just give a very beautiful performance about a place that I have so much love for and find so much beauty in, and that was exactly where I was coming from, with no other thought besides it.”
...on her marriage to Russell Brand:
Her 2010 marriage to Russell Brand ended when he infamously texted her that he was filing for divorce. She was in the midst of her tour for Teenage Dream— a global marathon marked, she tells me, by the fact that Brand never once came to visit.
...on losing her virginity at 16:
She lost her virginity at 16 in the front seat of a Volvo sedan while listening to Jeff Buckley's album Grace. "Love that record so much."
The February issue of GQ hits newsstands everywhere on January 28.
Read the full interview
here.
