Throwback Thursday: Katy Perry, ‘By the Grace of God’

Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly series showcasing an album, single, music video or performance of a bygone era and its personal and/or cultural significance.

Hollywood is completely dehumanizing. From the Golden Age (circa 1915-1963) to the social detachment in the present, celebrities are seen and portrayed as creatures of glitz and glamour, stripped of their emotions on the pages of glossy magazines and digital spreads. It’s the American dream (reimagined) to chase after things far from our grasp, and so, even we are trapped in the cycle of consuming the flesh of our favorites to quench some wicked desires. One of the biggest pop stars on the planet, Katy Perry has been a prominent fixture of mainstream exploitation for over a decade. Through the extravagant costumes and Tumblr-ready aesthetics, she was and is never Katheryn Hudson to a wide swath of the population.

She’s Katy Perry, purveyor of succulent and sweet pop confection without an ounce of real, raw, remarkable human feeling. And so, throughout much of her career, she’s upheld those tragic expectations of her in the work, from 2008’s One of the Boys to 2017’s Witness, which has served only to reaffirm perceptions of her. It’s a cold, dark, dangerous place within which to exist, merely surviving on the crumbs gatekeepers are willing to give. But with “By the Grace of God,” a bone-chilling piano ballad on her third Capitol Records release, Prism, she uncages her struggle with depression following the very-public divorce from actor and comedian Russell Brand. On the opening stanza, which nearly crumbles upon her touch, she confesses a twisted mental state, “Was 27, surviving my return of Saturn / A long vacation didn’t sound so bad / Was full of secrets, locked up tight like Iron Mountain / Running on empty, so out of gas.”

The backdrop of only piano and a light dusting of percussion is the most appropriate setting for her vocals. Say what you will, but Hudson allows herself to soar, scars and all. She lingers in the misery for a time, but she soon realizes her true worth that just can not be kept quiet for very long. “Thought I wasn’t enough / Found I wasn’t so tough / Laying on the bathroom floor,” she wrangles on the pre-chorus, laying out exactly what her bottoming out was like. “We were living on a fault line / And I felt the fault was all mine / Couldn’t take it anymore.”

The song, co-written with producer Greg Wells (Adel, Dua Lipa, Ariana Grande), catapults to the apex of freedom with the hook. “By the grace of God / I picked myself back up / I put one foot in front of the other and I / Looked in the mirror and decided to stay / Wasn’t gonna let love take me out that way,” she unpacks with emotional blow after blow. In the age when talking about mental health is becoming more prevalent, to cut down on the stigma, Hudson’s performance is as if an angel gliding down from the heavens, a transcendent act of hope. It’s a type of honesty rarely shared what with the profusion of likes and shares the social media era has wrought, both deconstructing any sense of humanity and drawing celebrities into the limelight whether they choose it or not. “By the Grace of God” was never an official radio single, but it is far and away her finest, most evocative moment on record.

By the grace of God, Hudson has always been offering up purposeful pop. And it’s time for us to listen to her…finally.

Listen below:

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