Katy Perry has had some shitty exes, so it stands to reason that she’d write songs about them and put them on her albums. However, while her songwriting is confessional in certain ways, she’s insisted that she didn’t want to get too sinister and call these assholes out too badly on Prism.
From MTV News:
“Well I never try to make people out to be villains, too much. There’s a lot of empathy in my writing, even if there is pain and sadness.
“I think that I’m not always trying to point the finger. I think on this record, the whole Prism record, it’s very self-reflective and you hear that I’ve kind of gone inside more so and looked at where I can make myself better, did a patchwork thing, rather than like ‘Screw you. You’re crazy. Fuck you.'”
That’s no more obvious than on the song, “It Takes Two,” on which she apologizes to a former lover.
“There’s one song on the record called ‘It Takes Two,’ which is about specifically that. Because it’s really easy when relationships end to be like ‘That guy was a f—ing douchebag.’ But really if you laid it down, and you saw the whole span of the relationship, you saw that you were in love, you saw the intimate moments, you saw the pain, you saw all the emotions and you have to kind of say ‘Well, what responsibility can I take for myself in all of this’.”
Well, that’s big of her. And, you know, something a mature adult SHOULD do. She would just sorta look like a bitter bitch if she complained the whole record (though after what Russell did, I’d say she has every reason to be). WHATEVER. Bottom line is that Prism is a really, really good pop record.