When Christina Perri took our call on February 3, ahead of her Emirates Airlines Jazz Festival performance on February 25, she was celebrating a big day.
“It’s actually the five-year anniversary for... the day that my managers found me on the internet — so my career’s five year anniversary,” she admitted. “It’s been great. I went and I celebrated, I saw my managers and I had a waffle brownie sundae, which is what I did five years ago today. I remember going, ‘I think my life is going to change,’ and I ate a waffle. It’s a delicious tradition.”
It seems like the 28-year-old’s life is full of milestones, and she remembers them clear as yesterday. One such surreal moment was when her breakout hit, Jar of Hearts, shot to the top of the charts after being featured on televised dancing competition So You Think You Can Dance.
“It was 8pm on June 30 in 2010, the exact moment that everything changed. I was inside of the theatre that they shoot the show, and I was sitting in the audience. They took away my cell phone while I was in there, so I had no idea that, when the show was live on television, 220,000 people downloaded the song on iTunes,” she said.
When she left the theatre and was handed her phone back, she watched in disbelief as the song jumped from No 36 to 26 to 16.
“It shot up the charts by midnight. I was the No 1 most Googled thing in the whole world. That was probably the moment when I was like, ‘Okay. I guess I exist now.’ Like, I was a waitress a few hours ago, and now I’m a recording artist,” she said.
The Philadelphia-native said she “felt like Cinderella”. She quit her waitressing gig and flew to New York City the next day.
“I met with every record label ... People thought the song might go up and come down real quick, but what happened is that it stayed up there all week. And that’s why every major label offered me a deal.”
When the immediate excitement of her fairy tale began to fade, however, the real work began.
“I worked that single. I went to every city that I could, and I played that song 7,000 times, and I went to every radio station — all those things. It didn’t even peak until January of the next year. It went platinum, and then it went double platinum two weeks later,” she said.
Anyone else might have been sick of the tune four years on. After all, Los Angeles-based Perri has two albums to her name now in the form of 2011’s Lovestrong and 2014’s Head or Heart. Even album number three is in the works. (“Whenever I write something that I sort of like, I’ve been putting it in a folder called ‘Album Three’. I just don’t go in there, I don’t listen to anything, I don’t edit anything, and then once this whole cycle for album two is over, I can sit down with this folder and go through it and emotionally get ready for album three,” she said.)
But despite the passage of time, Perri insisted that her emotional connection to Jar of Hearts hasn’t faltered one bit.
“I still go to some unexplained place when I’m singing it. I think it’s because I’m so grateful, because it is the song that changed my life ... Every time I play it, it’s like a thank you to the universe for gifting me this dream life. Now it’s all about the experience I have with the audience, so when they sing along, it’s fresh and different every time.”
*Tickets to see James Blunt and Christina Perri perform at Dubai Media City Amphitheatre on February 25 start at Dh295 at ticketmaster.ae.
