September 2020 - Music

Album of the Month - Smile by Katy Perry

It is either auspicious, or unfortunate, that Katy Perry is releasing her sixth album, “Smile,” the same week that her titanically successful 2010 record “Teenage Dream” is celebrating its 10th birthday.

On the one hand, the anniversary reminiscences have been especially rosy; who right now is not nostalgic for what their life sounded like 10 years (let alone 10 months) ago? But reflecting on the staggering commercial success of that eight-times-platinum record puts into stark focus just how far, in the last several years, Perry has strayed from the gravitational center of American pop music.

“Teenage Dream” spawned a record-tying five No. 1 singles; the only other album to achieve such a mass-cultural feat was Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” By contrast, of the last five singles Perry, 35, has released — all in the yearlong, spaghetti-against-the-wall lead-up to “Smile” — none exceeded No. 40 on the Billboard chart. Three of them failed to crack the Hot 100 at all.

Most of Perry’s biggest hits, and four of the five No. 1 songs on “Teenage Dream,” were collaborations with the star producers Max Martin and Dr. Luke, who, by the mid-aughts, had boiled pop hitmaking down to a science. (Or maybe an arithmetic: Martin has famously referred to songwriting as “melodic math.”) But science and math don’t sell concert tickets or magazine covers, so the ebullient personality and quirky co-written lyrics Perry, a daughter of Pentecostal ministers gone saucily secular, brought to these songs was crucial. She was the fluttering heart inside the algorithm — wacky, seductive and full of fallible humanity.

The most surprising strength of “Smile,” though, is the way it circles back to the earliest days of Perry’s recording career. Years before she became Katy Perry, the 16-year-old Katy Hudson released an angsty but ecstatic Christian-rock record — think mid-90s Alanis, had she been addressing her songs to Christ instead of Dave Coulier. While “Smile” lacks that alt-rock edge, its most deeply felt material has a familiar devotional quality about it. “I am resilient, born to be brilliant,” she sings with soulful conviction on “Resilient,” a reunion with her “Firework” producers Stargate. On the title track, she posits that “rejection can be God’s protection.”

Most striking, though, is the Amy Grant-style gospel pop of the penultimate track, “Only Love.” Atop openhearted keyboard chords, Perry, a new mother, extends an olive branch to her parents: “If I had nothing to lose, I’d call my mother and tell her I’m sorry,” she sings. “I’d pour my heart and soul into a letter and send it to my dad.”

Their version of faith may look different from hers, but Perry sounds like she has not given up searching for a force greater than herself. In these moments, however fleeting, she seems at last to have figured out what “purposeful pop” actually means to her.