Music Monday #13: Teenage Dream The Complete Confection by Katy Perry

"I wish I knew then, What I know now, Wouldn't dive in, Wouldn't bow down, Gravity hurts, You made it so sweet, Till I woke up on, On the concrete"
- 'Wide Awake' - Katy Perry

'Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection' I believe is the second album in this list that is a second edition, there is at least two others to come in this list that share this trait.  Whenever an album is released, all the tracks tend to fit a theme, but for the sake of brevity and also sometimes because of technical limitations, things often get cut.  Future albums don't often share the theme, and the artist goes in a different direction with their work.  From time to time it is worthwhile to reissue albums with tracks added to them that fit the narrative or the theme that existed.  This issue of Teenage Dream justifies that if not for any other reason but for the addition of 'Wide Awake' and 'Part Of Me' more than anything.

Wide Awake is my favourite Katy Perry track, both for the music and for the lyrics.  This issue of the album was released in 2012 a year where my world figuratively came to an end.  A lot of things fell apart for me that year, friendships fell apart, conflict arose, and a love was lost because of poison in my ear - that's cryptic I know and very Shakespearean but this is a story I'm not willing to tell publicly for so many reasons.  Wide Awake serves as a reminder for me of that time when I fell back down to Earth with a thud.  That sense of loss was amplified by 'The One That Got Away' a song that literally made me cry because of the chord it struck, and the nerve it hit.

I was 24 in 2012, which for most people is a time when their life is moving forward, where their turbulent teenage years are behind them.  For me though, given the trauma of my childhood that I alluded to, my adolescence was essentially delayed for lack of a better descriptor.  The years I spent in University from 2006 through 2009 and the years that followed graduation for me marked a time when I developed most of the social skills that people my own age had developed a decade before.  I learned a lot in those years and what I learned helped shape who I am now but I think of those years more as "growing down" than "growing up" in that I receded into behaviours that I'm once again growing out of now years later but came at the worst possible time.  Those years are meant to be when you build the foundation for your life and what you will do with it, but I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life and even today I am still uncertain but I at least think I am better able to identify what I want and what I don't, even if the former is still much harder than the latter.

Katy Perry is often considered by people to be a pop artist who makes music with little substance, I think this judgement is unfounded.  Teenage Dream is an album that like the title suggests needs a teenage mindset to understand the depth of the lyrics and what they mean.  Even now I know that people still roll their eyes when you describe her as deep and that's okay that derision is an indicator of cynicism something that you develop with age, which side of this debate you fall on is a clear marker for how seriously you take yourself, your life, and how old before your time you have become. 

On a more light-hearted note this album also includes 'Firework' a track that serves a particular purpose for me in that it was the reason I discovered a guy named Peter Lee Johnson a guy from Seattle who created a Youtube channel where he uploaded videos of him playing Violin.  One particular video saw him perform a violin cover of Firework.  If you haven't figured out by now from this and previous posts the violin is one of my favourite musical instruments and I am astounded by anyone who can play it well.  I find it not only sounds beautiful but it also looks beautiful too.  Peter posted a number of videos on his channel, he still does; another particular favourite of mine is a mash-up video that fuses Bach with Taio Cruz's 'Dynamite' which I still listen to from time to time when I want something that will make me smile.

I've followed Katy Perry's career since 2012, I hadn't paid much attention to her work prior to the release of The Complete Confection which is yet another reason why I think the reissue was justified as I am an example of a consumer that might not have connected with her music to the extent I did if it weren't for that particular combination of tracks.  Indeed, there is another album on this list that I will discuss when the time comes but it shares this trait and again I think it was justified, as for those that criticise reissue albums for the sparsity of new content, no-one is forcing you to buy every single album an artist puts out, you can buy individual tracks through Amazon, Apple Music, and you can listen to tracks through Spotify without having to buy a whole album, I don't get the anger people have in this regard - it would be different if the tracks were exclusive to that release and could not be bought or accessed elsewhere.