Imagine you just released a big-budget pop album and are touring what feels like every corner of the world. On top of that, you are quite literally blasting off to outer space. Yet, all the general public seems to be paying attention to right now is a 2009 single that sounds nothing like anything else you have ever done, and people are starting to want more. If your name is Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson and you go by Katy Perry, no need to imagine.
Riddled all over my feed as of late are snippets of Katy Perry’s “Thinking of You,” the single sandwiched between “I Kissed a Girl” and “Hot n Cold” on one end and “Waking Up in Vegas” and “California Gurls” on the other. Unlike those songs and most others in her career, including the record-setting singles from ‘Teenage Dream’ that currently tie the record with Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ for most number-one singles from the same album, this song kind of faded into obscurity. However, with Katy Perry launching into space while most people are fine with her staying in cruise control, people have been reminiscing about staying tuned to Katy Hudson over Katy Perry – and there’s no better song to do that with than “Thinking of You.”
Penned by an 18-year-old heartbroken Katy Hudson, it’s hard to believe at first that this is a song from Katy Perry’s ‘One of the Boys’ and not a Paramore or Avril Lavigne cut (which is even funnier considering this early career Perry was on the 2008 Vans Warped Tour). This song was backlogged for years, with videos surfacing of her performing it acoustically even before “I Kissed a Girl” took off.
However, the reason for its recent virality is less about pop punk and more about Perry’s vocal delivery. The exact part that I’ve been seeing the most is the song’s second verse which reads:
“You’re like an Indian summer in the middle of winter / Like a hard candy with a surprise center”
But, to put it phonetically, it comes across more like this:
“You’RE like an Indian SUMmeR in tha middle of uhWINteRRR / Like a haRd candeeee with urhh suRRRRRRRprise cen TER”
I guess we were really feeling the R’s, Katy? And the craziest case of the R’s comes in the song’s literal opening word. “Comparisons” becomes “Compare uh seRRRns.”
TikTok creator @stefanb2000 has been ringleading the “Thinking About You” craze with his repeated lip syncs of the second verse as he contorts his tongue to match the R’s to an absolutely diabolical degree. Besides the tongue, most of the comments are in agreement that this song was, more than anything else, her Alanis Morissette tribute. In chronically online terms, put best by TikTok commenter @ellie.dpr, “Katy grabbed Alanis Morissette’s nachos off her table while she was eating them.”
Besides the emphasis on the R sound utilized by Morissette and Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries (while more thanks to her Irish accent than a deliberate choice), it’s easy to see where this influence shines. The song was very obviously written by someone feeling the absolute emotional anguish that translates to this rock/adult contemporary ballad sound so well. Every word sounds like it hurts.
The chorus, variations of “When I’m with him, I am thinking of you,” snowballs from a few tears into an outright ugly cry by the end of the song. It’s easy to laugh it off when hearing it in passing because of its sheer emotional intensity, but the longer you listen, you get swallowed in the same heartbreak teenage Katy Hudson felt.
Another huge song from this era that reminded me a lot of “Thinking of You” is Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” When you listen again outside of the hit-single, retail environment it has been comfortably sitting in for years, you hear similar levels of emotional enunciation in each word. Even in the famous sing-along chorus when Fergie remarks that she’s “gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket,” it almost sounds like she’s crying when she bookmarks the phrase with “blankET,” heavy on the “eh” sound. It’s a level of fervor that we haven’t heard in the top 10 in a while.
Katy Perry’s “Thinking of You” is incredibly down to earth. While it might dig a little too deep, it makes sense why fans want Katy Perry, and even some of her pop music contemporaries, to get out of space and put her feet in the emotional, R-sound-riddled mud.