The 2020s File Feature
Daisies
Daisies — Katy Perry (2020) Katy Perry released "Daisies" on May 15, 2020, through Capitol Records, marking a deliberate artistic pivot after several years o…
01 The Story
Daisies — Katy Perry (2020)
Katy Perry released "Daisies" on May 15, 2020, through Capitol Records, marking a deliberate artistic pivot after several years of commercial turbulence. The song arrived as the lead single from her fifth studio album, "Smile," and it signaled a more introspective, stripped-back direction than the maximalist pop anthems that had defined her earlier career. The timing of the release coincided almost exactly with Perry's public announcement that she was expecting her first child with actor Orlando Bloom, lending the track an added layer of personal significance that fans and critics were quick to note.
The production was handled by Jon Bellion, the Grammy-winning songwriter and producer who had previously collaborated with artists including Justin Bieber, Halsey, and The Chainsmokers. Bellion constructed a soundscape that leaned heavily on acoustic textures, featuring guitar-forward arrangements and a relatively spare mix compared to the dense, synthesizer-heavy productions that had characterized Perry's "Prism" and "Witness" eras. The restraint was clearly intentional. Perry co-wrote the song alongside Bellion, and the two worked to craft verses that would feel intimate and genuine rather than stadium-sized and declarative.
Perry had faced a difficult stretch in the years immediately preceding "Daisies." The "Witness" campaign of 2017 had been received coolly by critics and underperformed commercially relative to expectations set by her earlier blockbuster run. Singles from that era failed to replicate the crossover success of "Roar," "Dark Horse," or "Firework," and Perry stepped back from the intense promotional pace she had maintained for most of her career. The hiatus, while quiet, proved creatively productive. She began working with Bellion and other collaborators on material that would eventually become "Smile."
"Daisies" entered the Billboard Hot 100 and became a meaningful chart performer for the artist at a moment when re-establishing commercial traction was a stated priority. The song reached number 36 on the Hot 100 and performed more strongly on the Adult Pop Airplay chart, where it climbed into the top five. Internationally the track fared well in several markets, particularly across parts of Europe and Australia, where Perry has historically maintained a devoted radio audience. The song also accumulated significant streaming numbers, with its Spotify streams eventually crossing into the hundreds of millions.
The music video, directed by Liza Voloshin, was shot in rural locations and featured Perry in natural, earthy settings that reinforced the song's thematic content. The visual presentation was deliberately unadorned compared to the elaborate conceptual videos Perry had produced during peak commercial years, and critics interpreted the aesthetic choice as consistent with the song's message about persisting through doubt and criticism. The video was released on the same day as the audio and quickly accumulated tens of millions of views.
Critical reception was broadly positive. Reviewers noted the song's relatability and emotional directness, with several outlets highlighting that it represented a more mature register for Perry as a songwriter. Rolling Stone included it among the stronger offerings on the "Smile" album when reviewing the full project later that summer. Some commentators observed that "Daisies" functioned as a kind of mission statement for the record, setting up the resilience theme that would thread through the remaining tracks.
The song was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Pop Solo Performance at the 2021 ceremony, the 63rd Grammy Awards. The nomination represented meaningful institutional recognition for Perry at a stage of her career when critical re-evaluation was underway. She did not win in that category, but the nomination reinforced that "Daisies" had landed as one of the more substantive entries in her catalog during the period.
Perry performed the song on several high-profile television platforms during the promotional cycle, including appearances designed to reach both her legacy fanbase and new listeners who had come of age since her commercial peak. The live performances consistently drew notice for their relative simplicity, with Perry foregrounding her vocal delivery rather than elaborate staging. Within the broader arc of her catalog, "Daisies" stands as a transitional marker: a song that acknowledged the commercial and critical difficulties of the preceding years while projecting confidence about what lay ahead.
02 Song Meaning
Meaning and Themes: Daisies
At its core, "Daisies" is a song about defying the skeptics. Katy Perry built the track around the central image of being told that one's ambitions are as modest and commonplace as daisies in a field, and then choosing to pursue those ambitions anyway, loudly and without apology. The flower metaphor carries a dual meaning that gives the song its emotional lift: daisies are simple and overlooked, but they are also perennial, persistent, and impossible to fully suppress once they take root. The lyrical framework turns an apparent insult into a source of pride.
The song's emotional register is one of defiant optimism, but Perry is careful to ground it in something more complicated than simple triumphalism. The narrator has clearly absorbed real criticism, faced real discouragement, and been told by real people that her dreams were too small or too naive or simply not going to work. The weight of that history sits inside the song even as the chorus asserts something like triumph. That layering of vulnerability beneath a confident surface is what separates "Daisies" from more straightforward empowerment pop, and it is where the song earns its emotional credibility.
Producer Jon Bellion's decision to keep the sonic landscape relatively spare was essential to the song's thematic delivery. A more maximalist production would have undercut the intimacy of the lyrical content. The acoustic foundation tells the listener that this is a personal statement rather than a manufactured anthem, and it invites a closer, more considered listen than the arena-pop of Perry's earlier era demanded.
In the context of Perry's broader artistic biography, "Daisies" functions as a self-referential document. By 2020, she had spent roughly a decade in the public eye, navigating the particular pressures that attach to a pop artist who has achieved enormous early success. The commercial underperformance of "Witness" had generated a sustained critical narrative about her decline, and that narrative was very much present in the cultural atmosphere when "Daisies" arrived. The song does not address that narrative directly, but it speaks to exactly the kind of external doubt and dismissal that had been publicly directed at her career, which made the personal and professional registers of the song inseparable for most listeners.
The daisy imagery also connects to a broader tradition in popular music of using simple natural symbols to carry complex emotional freight. Flowers have historically functioned in song as vehicles for talking about love, loss, resilience, and identity, and Perry activates that tradition knowingly. The choice of the daisy specifically, rather than a rose or a more conventionally glamorous flower, reinforces the theme of underestimation. Daisies are not spectacular. They are humble. And that is exactly the point.
The Grammy nomination for Best Pop Solo Performance at the 63rd ceremony confirmed that the song resonated with the music industry beyond its commercial performance. For a track this emotionally modest in its construction, institutional recognition of that kind was notable. It signaled that the song had achieved something beyond trend-chasing: a genuine statement of artistic identity at a specific moment of professional reinvention.
The song's arrival alongside Perry's pregnancy announcement shaped how many listeners received it, even if that biographical layer was not encoded in the lyrics. The idea of growing something from a small, overlooked beginning, of nurturing potential that others have undervalued, took on additional resonance in that context. It became, for many fans, a song not just about career perseverance but about becoming, in the broadest sense of the word. Within Perry's catalog, it occupies a distinct position: a bridge between the commercial ambition of her peak era and the more reflective work that defines her mature phase.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging