“Gwa, gwa, gwa, gwa, GWAH,” Perry projects, extending her legs, crossing them at the ankles and resting her heels on the makeup table. As someone slips a pair of glittery tabi socks onto her feet, a blur of others poke at her and tug at her and dust her face with Super White theatrical powder.

“It takes a village!” she trills, and the crew laugh anxiously. Her geisha wig has yet to be secured to her head. Her pink kimono is draped on a hanger. In just twenty-five minutes, she’s supposed to go live.

It’s been six years since Katy Perry announced herself with “I Kissed a Girl,” which became her first hit single (and somehow made Chapstick sexy). Ever since, her immense popularity has stemmed largely from her ability to straddle that divide between Madonna (one of her idols) and girl next door. Far more wholesome than that twisted genius Lady Gaga, Perry still exudes vastly more heat and sensuality than, say, Taylor Swift. Part of that’s due to Perry’s top-heavy physicality, but her sly lyrics and full-throated delivery deserve credit, too. In her music, all of which she co-writes, she handily mixes innocence with lust. She wants to be your homecoming queen and made her mark singing about reading Seventeen and learning how to shave her legs. But she also yearns to melt your Popsicle and see your peacock, cock, cock. When you add in God—she was raised Pentecostal and once recorded on a Christian label—things get even more complicated.

Lay me down at your altar, baby, she sings in “Spiritual,” a bonus track, written with her sometime boyfriend John Mayer, off her latest album, Prism—which has sold 771,000 copies (and garnered two Grammy nominations) since it debuted in October. Your electric lips have gotten me speaking in tongues. Somehow, though, when she sings about sex, it doesn’t come off as raunchy so much as...uplifting. Positive. And downright good for you. No wonder she has more Twitter followers (48 million) than anyone on earth.

“Fifteen-minute warning!” Perry’s assistant manager, a petite woman named Ngoc (rhymes with “sock”), calls out.

The kimono is on now. So are the fake eyelashes. Angular and immense, they stand out against Perry’s now ghostly skin. She decided on the geisha act, she says, because she loves spectacle, and she loves Japan (she calls it “the capital of adorableness”), and she thinks the theme fits the song she’s about to sing, “Unconditionally,” which she wrote for Mayer the last time they broke up. (They’re together again now.)

“I was thinking about unconditional love, and I was thinking: Geishas are basically, like, the masters of loving unconditionally.” She’s so earnest, I don’t have the heart to point out that in the gamut of human interactions, the courtesan-patron relationship is, um, maybe the most conditional relationship there is? (Days later, when asked if she followed the mini furor that her performance ignited—some said it amounted to singing in blackface—she tells me she respects the debate but thinks her critics misunderstood. “All I was trying to do is just give a very beautiful performance about a place that I have so much love for and find so much beauty in, and that was exactly where I was coming from, with no other thought besides it.”)

The middle child of two traveling ministers, Perry moved around a lot as a kid and developed a canny intelligence that owes more to life living than book learning. By the time the family settled on the poor side of wealthy Santa Barbara, Perry—whose given name is Katheryn Hudson—was more focused on singing and growing up than on studying.

“I lay on my back one night and looked down at my feet, and I prayed to God. I said, ‘God, will you please let me have boobs so big that I can’t see my feet when I’m lying down?’ ” At age 11, “God answered my prayers,” she says, glancing south. “I had no clue they would fall into my armpits eventually.”

By then, she’d already discovered what she calls her “magic trick”: When she sang, people would pay her for it. At 13, “I’d go to the farmers’ market in Santa Barbara, and I’d put out my guitar case, and I’d test out these little ditty songs that I would write, and I would get a couple of avocados, a bag of pistachios, and, like, fifteen bucks. That was a lot of money for me.”

The family was poor, as in eating-from-the-food-bank poor. “We kind of barely got by,” she says. “Money was always the biggest problem in our house.” So she set out to make some. Her parents—she calls them “oddballs, but I love them”—encouraged her. They’d done some wild living—her mom once went dancing in Spain with Jimi Hendrix, Perry says, and her dad used LSD when he hung with Timothy Leary’s circle. Perhaps to make up for that, they were committed, now, to God and to protecting their children from temptation. Perry and her brother and sister were forbidden to listen to rock ’n’ roll, to eat Lucky Charms (luck evokes Lucifer), or to watch racy movies.

But Perry was her own girl. She found ways to listen to Incubus, Morcheeba, Queen, and Portishead. She lost her virginity at 16 in the front seat of a Volvo sedan while listening to Jeff Buckley’s album Grace. “Love that record so much,” she tells me. That was in Nashville, where she’d gone to record her first album, a gospel-rock effort on a soon-to-be-extinct label. When that fizzled, she found herself back in Santa Barbara writing songs. She managed to get a meeting with Glen Ballard, who produced Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. He encouraged her to move to L.A., where they made an album that was never released because, she was told, it didn’t sound enough like Avril Lavigne. She was signed and dropped by two major labels, all while doing odd jobs and passing bad checks before getting picked up by Capitol.

She didn’t quit, she says, because she believes in “a cosmic energy that is bigger than me,” although she has abandoned many of the teachings of her parents. (“I do not believe God is an old guy sitting on a throne with a long beard.... I don’t believe in heaven and hell as a destination.”) Today, hers is a faith born of possibility and optimism, she says, adding that she takes being a role model seriously. “I’ve never had any plastic surgery,” she says proudly. “Not a nose, not a chin, not a cheek, not a tit. So my messages of self-empowerment are truly coming from an au naturel product.”