9781422286616

house one day. “We’re trying on all our outfits, like girls do, and out of nowhere I heard the lyrics to Killer Queen . Time stood still. The music was totally different from anything I’d heard. The heavens opened and saved me. From then on, Queen have been my biggest influence.” In high school, depending on where you stood, she was either mixing with the wrong crowd or already standing out from the crowd. Katy described herself as “a hop-around. I hung out with the rockabilly crew, the guys who were trying to be rappers, the funny kids.” Having been exposed to Freddie Mercury and company, she now wanted to know everything about pop and smuggled a Nirvana album into her house. Successful female singers Joan Jett and Pat Benatar were also early role models, while a series of summer camps she went to – one surf camp in particular – started to make her examine beliefs she had previously obeyed unquestioningly. When she met a guy she liked, for instance, she asked herself questions about why she should “save herself” for marriage. “I was like, I don’t know if I can hold that promise because this guy at camp is really cute,” she later recalled. “Sex wasn’t talked about in my home, but I was a very curious young girl.” Questions were asked when her mother discovered a thong in her underwear drawer, but the genie was out of the bottle. Katy Hudson was no longer walking around with her eyes closed; for better or for worse, she was a young woman with all the usual hopes, wishes, and desires that follow.

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