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Katy Perry was enjoying her new baby, Daisy, and the release of her new album, Smile, over the weekend. She also had a chance to exorcise a few past demons as well, reaching back to her divorce from Russell Brand almost a decade ago. In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia that was filmed just before the birth of her baby and edited right after, Katy spoke about the mental health journey she took to get \to Smile, and how she was at her darkest when she wrote the titular song. Much of her darkness revolved around her unresolved feeling about her divorce.
Katy Perry is opening up about her marriage to Russell Brand, nine years after the pair split back in 2011.
During an interview with 60 Minutes Australia that aired on Sunday, the pop songstress, 35, spoke candidly about her marriage to Brand, 45, and described the relationship as the “first breaking of my idealistic mind.”
“I was having great success at 23, 24 and 25 and then I met someone that was interesting and stimulating. It was just like a tornado, it was everything happening at once,” she revealed.
The “Smile” singer added that she has “always resonated with friction and resistance and challenges,” and said that she knows that about herself.
Katy told Vogue in 2013 that she’d not heard from Brand, “since he texted me saying he was divorcing me December 31, 2011,” and I have to assume that answer is the same today. Brand occasionally talks about Katy, saying he’d be open to establishing a friendship, but I think the truth is, neither has that much interest in reconnecting in any way. Honestly, I don’t blame her. When I went through my own mental cleansing there were a lot of people I forgave or exonerated from the crimes I’d accused them. It helped a lot to let go of the anger, but it did nothing for me to reconnect with those people. I finally just walked away from the lot of them, no hard feelings but with no space for them in my happiness. Anger is easier to shake than pain.
I do like the way Katy’s framing her experience with Brand, though. It does seem like she’s really worked through her emotions on it. I can absolutely see how she got caught up in everything that was happening at the time and my guess is she likely gave him credit for some of the other wonderful things happening to her simply because they coexisted at the same time. But the part that spoke the loudest to me was her description of, “first breaking of my idealistic mind.” I mean, grammatical awkwardness aside, the sentiment is likely relatable to many of us. Maybe it wasn’t love, but we all had that moment when we realized life was through throwing softballs at us. For me, it was also in my early 20 but it was professional, not romantic. I’m still processing that idealistic break, I can’t imagine if it had come at the hands, or in Katy’s case – thumbs – of a a person I pledged my life to.
You can watch the full 60 Minutes Australia segment below:
Photo credit: Getty Images, YouTube, WENN/Avalon
I honestly don’t understand what that is supposed to mean? “first breaking of my idealistic mind“ a realisation marriage and life wasn’t perfect?
Basically yes. Everything had been turning up great for her during that time and then someone she married sent her a divorce request via text and they never talked again. She was only in her 20s at the time, no real professional or personal failures to speak of.
I don’t think it’s fair to say she was learning life isn’t “perfect.” There’s often a certain idealism with young adulthood, no matter how sunny or traumatic your life was before. Life has a way of taking that idealism and forcing us to confront it.
Especially when dealing with a man who absolutely couches his speech in such intellectualism and maturity and then acts in ways that are counter to that.
I have been in the exact same position before, when life seems to be made out of rainbows and unicorns (predominantly), and the troughs were not that bad, and you get by generally through being naively optimistic, young and joyful. In that, you also believe in the good in everybody you meet, and you believe that all they possess is good intent. It sounds so silly, but it’s not hard to be in this bubble if you’ve been protected a lot of your life.
Then… the above all gets shaken in a very traumatic manner when you meet people that are just so beyond your vileness imagination, mostly because they take advantage of your naivety while at the same time damaging you. It takes a long, long time to heal from extreme situations like that because you are also working through extreme cognitive dissonance, moral dissonance and a broken sense of self-worth from all the gaslighting.
I totally get her when she says her idealistic mind was broken.
That’s really well put. Just opened up a whole new level of understanding about my past.
I think she means when your foundational world views are shattered. For instance, mine happened when I was 20. My life wasn’t roses or happiness by any means, but I believed the world worked in certain ways and that the people I cared about were good, and that love was the most important thing in the world (hugely idealistic romantic). Then the very first person I dated was a very sexually abusive famous individual and everything just…shifted. All my foundational views were smashed, and you have to rebuild them yourself.
Katy was always one of those fake pop whatevers. She is all autotuned. Can’t sing at all. She’s totally manufactured. Only became fanous on other people’s songs. Why she rhink she matters astounds me. Get Katy to write her own song and sing it without any help. Sorry, her bs has always appalled me
Wow. A little harsh, no? She’s still human. You don’t have to like her to have a bit of empathy.
You know she does write a lot of her own stuff, right? It’s pretty obvious that she does write because her lyrical choices are consistently questionable lol.
She has quite a few writing credits on other people’s songs (Nicki Minaj, Britney Spears, Rita Ora, Iggy Azalea). I think she wrote a hit for Kelly Clarkson too.
Her body language in her pictures with Russell are interesting – pulling/leaning away.
The Katy Perry who accepted a Asian Youth Ambassador position or whatever the fk it is called from Prince Charles. The Katy Perry who made sure to diss Meghan’s wedding gown saying she preferred Kate’s. I will pass.
Not every story is about Meghan…but in the same interview she said she greatly admired Meghan’s humanitarian work and thought it was great that she was a feminist.
She traveled with Hillary Clinton and worked hard to get her elected. I have a lot of respect for that. Whatever about someone commenting on a wedding dress.
I never understood why Perry got with Brand in the first place. He seemed greasy, skeevy, and “intellectual” only in the most poseur way. It sounds like the breakup made her understandably sad and heartbroken, but I think he did her a favor by walking away so quickly and cleanly.
I feel like she didn’t really learn from that, though. She ended up with John Mayer and made a video with him declaring their love for each other, then broke up. Now she’s with Orlando making videos that focus on her pregnancy and singing about how wonderful he is. She still seems very confident basing her art around the men in her life as she did with Brand at one point (I still remember her playing clips from her Indian wedding at an award show during a performance. Eek.).
meant to reply to someone sorry whoops
What I remember is that Katy married Russell thinking he was a party animal, but she was the bigger partier and he was happy to settle down. They were a mis-match and she dragged her feet filing divorce because of her super religious parents. They were living apart and not talking and Russell finally filed divorce to save Katy the embarassment.