Can you hear her roar?

A dizzying array of police lights flashed up and down the West Side Highway in New York on a damp Thursday in May. President Donald Trump was visiting the USS Intrepid, snarling traffic outside the Javits Convention Center, where Katy Perry was performing at a corporate showcase for her new partner, YouTube. The last time she was in the building was election night, when she had been preparing to toast the victory of Trump’s opponent.

For Perry, who prominently supported Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that party on November 8 began “with everybody looking fancy and beautiful and high on their horses,” she recalled in an interview several weeks after her YouTube set. The mood rapidly shifted when word started to spread that Clinton was not on her way there — news that Perry, 32, described as “traumatising.” “It was a revelation, it was a reckoning,” she said of Clinton’s loss.

Perry, who released her fourth major label album, ‘Witness’, stands as one of the biggest successes in the industry, alongside Madonna, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. She has sold 6.5 million albums and nearly 71 million digital songs in the United States, according to Nielsen Music; notched 14 Top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits; performed at the 2015 Super Bowl halftime show; and landed a gig as a judge on the revamped American Idol.

Transforming herself

But she said she had an awakening on election night tied to misogyny in her past. And she is undertaking a strenuous effort to prove she isn’t the same frothy Katy Perry as before, making over her look, her music and her vocabulary. For 96 hours, timed to the album’s release, she spread that message of “unity and communication” via filibuster — a nonstop YouTube live stream called ‘Witness World Wide’.

Thanks to Madonna’s restlessness, female pop stars are expected to reinvent themselves every few years, but there’s no guarantee that listeners will accept the changes. For Perry, the stakes couldn’t be higher: she believes she is now revealing her true self. The old Katy Perry is gone. “Every day when I think I know something, the universe shows me that I need to learn another lesson,” she told me in a Manhattan shared workspace. “So I stand here today, more so than any other day, saying I know nothing. I literally know nothing.”

“I feel very empowered,” she continued, “extremely liberated, liberated from the conditioning of the way I used to think, spiritually liberated, politically liberated, sexually liberated, liberated from things that don’t serve me.”

She said she stopped drinking (for now) since January 15, and she has been attending group therapy with her family. Her parents are Pentecostal pastors, and Perry, who was born Katheryn Hudson, was raised in a strict religious tradition.

Change is also the theme of the throbbing ‘Witness’, an introspective, less pop-driven album that’s a departure from her last two records, ‘Prism’ (2013) and ‘Teenage Dream’ (2010). It’s her first LP not to feature work from her longtime collaborator Dr. Luke — “I had to leave the nest,” she said — although she continued her partnership with Swedish hitmaker Max Martin. And she assumed even greater creative control, helping bring in producers like indie-pop duo Purity Ring, composer Dustin O’Halloran and English musician Jack Garratt to create a palette that’s dreamy and clubby, if not as grabby as her earlier records. Perry has always been known as a reliable singles artiste, but reviews haven’t been friendly. The album’s most successful single, ‘Chained to the Rhythm’, peaked at No. 4.
Under scrutiny

Perry doesn’t need to live in a house outfitted with 41 ‘Big Brother’-style cameras to be aware that she is under constant surveillance. She has a well-known strategy for frustrating the paparazzi, but that can’t stop the kind of gawking that accompanies daily life when you’re trading punches with another wildly famous blond pop star or dating a famous actor who enjoys nude paddleboarding. When she took up a vocal position as a Clinton supporter, she became a target of the alt-right. But as she started revving up for ‘Witness’, it felt like some on the left were also taking their knives out.

Over the years, Perry has absorbed criticism for cultural appropriation, for being too sexy on Sesame Street, for dating John Mayer. But in the past few months, the somewhat erratic nature of her album rollout dripped blood in the water. And the sharks started circling. Reacting to a steady stream of criticism is a “maddening game,” she said. Referring to what she called “this strange race to be the most woke,” she added, “They want you to stand for something, but once you do, and if you don’t do it perfectly, they’re ready to take you right down.”

To appreciate how Perry arrived at ‘Witness’, you have to understand her relationship to her biggest album, ‘Teenage Dream’. It had five No. 1 hits, tying a record Michael Jackson set with ‘Bad’, and solidified her image as a charmingly goofy sexpot who sings about love, partying and inner strength. Her breezy persona belied the gruelling work that went into touring, radio promotion and being the linchpin of a multimillion-dollar extravaganza.

The 2012 tour documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me captured a glimpse of the rigours: her marriage to comedian Russell Brand was crumbling as the burdens of becoming a superstar mounted. “I was just kind of like a deer in headlights a little bit,” she said. “I was like, does this happen to people? Like, is this normal? When people are just talking about ‘Teenage Dream,’ I’m like, please talk to me when you’ve done that. And lived through it. Because it was intense. And amazing and beautiful and horrible all at the same time.”

The Katy Perry viewers watched on ‘Witness World Wide’ is the Katy Perry I spent several days with: gregarious, intense, bold, endearing and full of contradictions. In our interview, she proclaimed herself devoted to dialogue but spoke in a near uninterrupted monologue. She griped frequently about the internet, but she boasts the highest number of Twitter followers of any user and just allowed her digital audience to watch her eat, sleep and spread her new gospel on a 96-hour infomercial. The old Katy Perry wasn’t a construct, she explained, and she isn’t dead. “I didn’t kill her, because I love her, and she is exactly what I had to do then,” she said. “And I’m not a con artiste, I didn’t con people, like, that was just me. And this is me now.”

Perry’s awakening has been tapped as a marketing strategy for ‘Witness’, and the live stream was selling her authenticity: If you dig hearing about her new perspective, maybe you’ll enjoy her song ‘Power’.

While there are still plenty of relationship songs on ‘Witness’ that will have fans wondering which of her beaus she misses more than she loved, seven tracks deal plainly with her new mindset. The most direct is ‘Bigger Than Me’, a statement of purpose akin to Michael Jackson’s ‘Man in the Mirror’. “It’s a departure, and it’s a necessary evolution that I have to take,” Perry said. “And I know that sometimes it feels publicly like I’m dragging concrete blocks, but like, the pyramids were made out of concrete blocks — or not cement. But do you know what I’m trying to say? I’m gonna get there.”