With the Super Bowl just days away, Katy Perry graces the cover of Billboard magazine ahead of her halftime performance. When she takes the stage at the University of Phoenix Stadium on Sunday, she will perform for 12-and-a-half minutes for an audience of about 100 million TV viewers and 63,400 attendees. The cover story follows Perry through rehearsals, where she dishes on her childhood, her home life, her relationship with John Mayer, her rumored beef with Taylor Swift, and her thoughts on all things Super Bowl XLIX-related, among other topics. Here's what we learned:
On rumored Taylor Swift Beef:
"If somebody is trying to defame my character, you're going to hear about it."
On why she wears the same tracksuit every day:
"I'm just not playing the picture game [with the paparazzi]. If I wear the same thing every day, the pictures don't sell."
On her on-again-off-again relationship with John Mayer:
"What I will say is that to have any relationship at this level you have to just be protective and figure out how to navigate it. There is no handbook. In all my relationships, I've learned how I have to be more careful and that it's not up for public consumption."
On growing up in a conservative household with hippie-turned-minister parents:
"I love my childhood because I can't change it, and it made me who I am. I grew up in a little bit of a bubble of ignorance and judgment. And so I'm happy that I've been able to evolve past that."
On her concerns about performing at the Super Bowl halftime show:
"Everyone has been asking me if I'm going to be nervous before the halftime show. I'm like, I'm f---ing human. This is the biggest event of my career."
On looking back at Madonna's 2012 performance and Beyoncé's 2013 performance:
"Those performances are clean and streamlined. They're about the catalog, the songs. I like Madonna for the graphic effects she brought. [Beyoncé] brought so much strength, so much sassiness and just the right amount of sex. She's an icon. Elvis, The Beatles, Michael Jackson -- she's in that category. I'm not. She's like five notches above me, and those levels are compounded in difficulty."
On performing with Lenny Kravitz:
"It's cool because it's different for me. Our voices are going to blend well together."
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