’I Almost Passed on Katy Perry’:
An Interview with Lava Records CEO Jason Flom
She hadn’t “gone places” yet, but Flom knew there was something about her. “A real star walks and talks and wears clothes differently than other people do. My ‘spidey senses’ tell me that. She’s one of those people. Back then, she didn’t have a dime. She can still dress in a way that somebody else may dress and look like a normal schloob. But she lights it up. That’s how it started.”
“I got her music that she had made for Columbia,” he says, referring to unreleased recordings he did for that label.
“And I went back to the office and played it for a bunch of my top people there. They were like ‘This f—ing sucks, this is terrible.’ The only one of the songs on the CD that became a hit was ‘Waking Up In Vegas.’ Even still, I loved it and everybody was like, ‘Please don’t sign this. We’re turning this company around, don’t weigh us down with this nonsense.’ I was like, ‘Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know.'”
“Then a month or so later I’m working out in the gym and I was listening to Katy in my headphones and I was like, ‘This is ridiculous, she’s great. I’m so dumb. How could I have slept on this?’ I always loved it, but I was listening to other people’s opinions and I was letting those sway me.
So I called her up. She was doing a lot of nothing. I don’t think she had a car. She might have not even had a phone. I think I called her at work. She was working at a place called Taxi making $10 an hour. It’s a demo listening service. It’s a place where you can send in your demo and supposedly professionals will listen to it. That’s where she was working, so I called her there. I said, ‘I wanna sign you,’ and she said, ‘Great,’ and that’s how the whole thing started. That was about eight years ago. 2008 maybe.”