I was retriggered by a big male that didn’t see women as equal. And that had been, unfortunately, a common theme in my upbringing

One-time pop princess Katy Perry has ditched the glossy hairdo and saccharine hits for an edgier vibe on new album Witness. It hasn’t pleased all her fans, but the singer tells Caryn Ganz she is only now revealing her true self. Portrait by Jody Rogac

Adizzying array of police lights flash up and down the West Side Highway in New York on a damp Thursday in May. President Donald Trump is visiting the USS Intrepid, snarling up the traffic outside the Javits Convention Center, where Katy Perry is performing at a corporate showcase for her new partner, Youtube. The last time she was in the building was election night, when she had been preparing to toast the victory of Trump’s opponent.

For Perry, who prominently supported Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that party on 8 November began “with everybody looking fancy and beautiful and high on their horses,” she recalls in an interview several weeks after her Youtube set. The mood rapidly shifted when word started to spread that Clinton was not on her way there – news that Perry, 32, describes as “traumatising.”

“It was a revelation, it was a reckoning,” she says of Clinton’s loss. She started downing drinks and reached out to the nearest person for physical support: Lady Gaga, also there to celebrate the election of the first female president. There they were, “Gaga and I just looking at each other and being like, f*** it, we need to touch each other,” Perry says. And for a minute, two of the biggest pop stars in the world held hands.

Alliances aren’t easily made in the superstar stratosphere, where elbows are often sharp. And Perry, who released her fourth major label album, Witness, on 9 June, stands as one of the biggest successes in the industry, alongside Madonna, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. She has sold 6.5 million albums and nearly 71 million digital songs in the United States, according to Nielsen Music; notched 14 Top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits; performed at the 2015 Super Bowl halftime show; and landed a gig as a judge on the revamped American Idol, which is to return in September.

But she says she had an awakening on election night tied to misogyny in her past. And she is undertaking a strenuous effort to prove she isn’t the same frothy Katy Perry as before, making over her look, her music and her vocabulary. For 96 hours, timed to the album’s release, she spread that message of “unity and communication” via filibuster – a nonstop Youtube live stream called Witness World Wide, organised into segments (a therapy session, meditations, a cathartic chat with Rupaul) where the words “safe place” came up a lot and Perry worked out to her own album.

Thanks to Madonna’s restlessness, female pop stars are expected to reinvent themselves every few years, but there’s no guarantee that listeners will accept the changes. For Perry, the stakes couldn’t be higher: she believes she is now revealing her true self. The old Katy Perry is gone.

“Every day when I think I know something, the universe shows me that I need to learn another lesson,” she tells me in a Manhattan shared workspace. “So I stand here today, more so than any other day, saying I know nothing. I literally know nothing.” (Perry often veers into platitudes, but she is consistent: During the live stream, she wore an I Know Nothing T-shirt for yoga, and the phrase is currently her Twitter bio.)

“I feel very empowered,” she continues, “extremely liberated, liberated from the conditioning of the way I used to think, spiritually liberated, politically liberated, sexually liberated, liberated from things that don’t serve me.”

She says she stopped drinking (for now) on 15 January, and she has been attending group therapy with her family. Her parents are Pentecostal pastors, and Perry, who was born Katheryn Hudson, was raised in a strict religious tradition. “I went to that dark place that I had been avoiding, and I dug out the mould,” she says. “It was not fun, but I did that – I’m still doing that.”

Change is also the theme of the throbbing Witness, an introspective, less pop-driven album that’s a departure from her last two records, Prism (2013) and Teenage Dream (2010). It’s her first LP not to feature work from her longtime collaborator Dr Luke – “I had to leave the nest,” she says; he declined to comment for this article – although she continued her partnership with Swedish hitmaker Max Martin.

And she assumed even greater creative control, helping bring in producers like indie-pop duo Purity Ring, composer Dustin O’halloran (the theme from Amazon’s Transparent) and English musician Jack Garratt, to create a palette that’s dreamy and clubby, if not as grabby as her earlier records. Perry has always been known as a reliable singles artist, but reviews haven’t been friendly. The album’s most successful single, Chained to the Rhythm, peaked at No. 4 in the US.