newcomers. And while the other acts opening various legs of Perry's U.S. tour — Capital Cities and Tegan & Sara — make oddball pop music, both have had top 20 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. Musgraves' "Follow Your Arrow" peaked at No. 60 on the Hot 100 and reached No. 10 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart.
"We left those worlds, but we kept our compasses," Perry adds. ("Awww," Musgraves interjects.)"I think [Kacey] straddles the line like I straddle the line of appropriateness and still maintaining a sexuality that is healthy and exciting. And it's not all about that. It's about sending inspiring and empowering messages and being a think-for-yourself type of woman." These two freethinkers crossed paths when Musgraves released the first single from "Same Trailer Different Park," "Merry Go 'Round," in September 2012. Perry tweeted her love for it. "I understand that I have a lot of followers on Twitter, and one tweet can go a distance," she says.
Musgraves felt the effects at a distance — she was crossing a street in Dublin when she glanced at her phone and saw her Twitter following spike. But Perry wasn't done yet. "Stalked her on the Internet, as I do with everyone," says Perry, who reached out to bring Musgraves to Los Angeles to work on the early writing sessions for "Prism." Though those songs didn't make the record, a partnership was born. Musgraves — along with Sara Bareilles, Ellie Goulding and Tegan & Sara — was part of Perry's We Can Survive concert, a benefit for young women with breast cancer, at the Hollywood Bowl, in Los Angeles, in October 2013. And the two got in another studio session at the time. "A good song came out of it," Musgraves told Billboard in December. "I love when brains come together with different colors and influences to throw into the mix. We're fans of each other, so it works." The announcement of the "Crossroads" taping followed a few months later.
The stakes are high for Musgraves to leverage her association with Perry into crossover opportunities in radio and touring alike. Although she has played a handful of stadium dates as an opener for Kenny Chesney and just wrapped an arena run with Lady Antebellum, her own draw as a headliner tells a more interesting story. On her most recent club tour, at the end of 2013, she played 800- to 1,000-capacity venues like Detroit's Saint Andrews Hall and New York's Bowery Ballroom — rooms more commonly associated with the latest indie-rock craze than a Nashville newbie. Playing to mainstream crowds in the Midwest and Canada could provide the exposure Musgraves needs to go from critical fave to Taylor Swift-like crossover. "It's an amazing pop look, the stamp of validation in another world for Kacey Musgraves from the queen, Katy," says Mitch Rose, head of the Los Angeles music department at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which booked both artists on the tour.
The Prismatic tour is Perry's second arena run, following California Dreams, in 2011 and 2012. The trek grossed $52.5 million from 105 shows, according to Billboard Boxscore, and was Billboard's 13th-highest-grossing tour of 2011. Although it proved to be a success, with 54 of her 98 gigs in 2011 selling out, it was a big risk for a singer who had "never played bigger than 2,500 seats," says Rose, who has been booking clubs and theaters for Perry since she got her start in 2008 as a Warped tour performer.
With its multiple costume and set changes (there's an Egyptian-themed staging for "Dark Horse," an acoustic section for the ballads and a "Hyper Neon" segment for hits like "Teenage Dream" and "Birthday"), Prismatic is Perry's bid to cement her status as a pop icon who can tour as well as she can churn out hits. "She sold every ticket to every seat the first week it went on sale," says AEG Live's Brian Murphy. "Our mouths were dropping." Connecting with her fans, he adds, was of utmost importance to Perry, whose set includes multiple walkways, some as long as 120 feet. "There's not a bad seat in the house."
The following night, at the "Crossroads" taping, there's a moment where the two singers present a mixed message. When Musgraves sings "Light up a joint — I would" near the climax of "Follow Your Arrow," Perry shakes her head no. (She's not a pot smoker. "I'm sensitive to Advil," she cracks.) For a second, it's as if Willie Nelson and Nancy Reagan were about to duet.
Apparently they both thought that Perry should be the one to wear the transparent skirt. And they certainly both agree about each other's songwriting. "At our cores, we both think a lot about narrative and characters and the subjects," says Perry.
Musgraves says "Teenage Dream" is "the best pop song ever written," and adds, "If you have the lyrics first, then it doesn't matter what the hell you do as far as fireworks or showiness."
Perry, no stranger to showiness, puts it in a nutshell: "If you don't have the songs, you look really dumb in the costumes."
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