Komby in 14 Steps — Step 9: Like Katy, roaring through the personal storm

There are storms you do not see coming — not the market's, not the giants' nor the “too much” rejections, but the ones inside, the ones that settle without warning on a morning when you are still standing and that, the same evening, leave you without an answer to the simplest question: why get up tomorrow. Like Katy is neither a marketing wink at a pop star nor a tribute to a career, charts or stage lights; it is a track anchored in what Katheryn Hudson — the woman, not the brand — went through personally, and what I recognised in her while I remain, facing her, a stranger. Points that converge, without the money, without the celebrity, with the same stubborn evidence: celebrity and money spare nobody when it comes to suffering.

What I took from Katy Perry's personal lived experience

I researched her intimate trials — not tours, not sales records, not the pro — the woman who said out loud what many keep locked in, whose story struck me because it resembles, on precise points, mine, without any of the compensations the world thinks are enough. In 2012, after her divorce from Russell Brand — a brief marriage, a brutal breakup, accounts that the end even came by message — she fell into deep depression, saying she no longer wanted to get out of bed, writing By the Grace of God about that moment when you look in the mirror and decide to stay — I looked in the mirror and decided to stay — because love, or the end of love, nearly took her another way. She spoke of suicidal thoughts, the feeling of not being “enough”, a fall too steep to get up as before, and a few years later, around 2017–2018, after a separation from Orlando Bloom, she described a low again: sadness, breakdown, dark thoughts, the feeling of being attacked from inside without being able to wake up. She spoke of a forced mental and spiritual journey — therapy, tools, inner work — not to save a career, but to stay alive, and more recently still, their confirmed separation in 2025 reminded the same thing: even with the light, even with the means, even with a daughter to raise, personal breakup remains a wave of NO that runs through the body. She said of one year that it was both the worst and the best — because pain and rebuilding coexist, and nobody, not even a star, gets around that. What I love in her story is not the glamour; it is that it resembles me on converging points — while I am a stranger next to her: divorce, feeling of no longer being “enough”, nights when you no longer want to get up, decision to stay, to roar, not to let pain take you out of the ring, storms that return even when you thought you had paid your dues, and above all that lesson she embodies despite herself: status does not immunise, you can have the world at your feet and suffer like anyone on a studio bed in London with a credit score rebuilt at two hundred pounds.

The trial: my storm, its points of convergence

After The Takeover — visibility, pressure of the gaze — something gave way in me, not the product, not the clients, but me: bootstrap fatigue, doubts, heavy mornings, that distance from yourself as if you were watching your life from outside. I knew that, not to compare myself to her in scale of fame, but to recognise the same type of inner fight. My divorce, around 2016 — twelve years, two children, proceedings, forced freedom that Higher documents — left a pain that does not disappear because you code or serve clients, shops, tertiary, restaurants; for her, Brand, then other breakups, for me, the blade, the court, the brutal “I”: same family of trial, not the same address, not the same bank account, the same rain in the head. She said she sometimes felt as if she were falling too many floors at once, and me too; she had to decide to stay — at the mirror, in the song, in life — and me too, another way: not giving up, not letting the storm dictate the end of the story. She roared publicly because her voice carries to the end of the world; I composed Like Katy in a studio, unknown, to empty the same material: the personal storm, not the pitch. Solo founders do not talk about this: we post wins, we hide nights, we say “grind” as if it were a virtue, while Katy Perry had the courage — and the resonance — to say that even at the top, you can want to disappear. I have neither summit nor resonance; I have a quasi-autobiographical album and the conviction that suffering is not reserved for those who have nothing — and is not cancelled by those who have everything. There were days when I opened neither Slack nor the studio, when I only walked in London rain — outside and inside — because it was not abandonment but what kept me from leaving the arena: for her, bed, mirror, decision to stay; for me, street, silence, then the mic; same fighter gesture, different backdrop.

What the body does in the rain — fame or not

You continue because you must — clients, children, deadlines — while the body betrays: less sleep, clenched jaw, irritability, loneliness in the middle of eight million Londons. One Tuesday, rain outside, rain inside, sitting in front of the mic, mute, as if the voice had left the body, that was the day I understood the storm does not pass if you hide it and you have to roar, not for the market, for yourself. When Katy Perry says she no longer wanted to get out of bed, or looked in the mirror to decide to stay, I do not hear a pop star but someone who touched the same bottom as millions of people — including a bootstrap founder without a TechCrunch headline — and the difference is the scale of gaze placed on her, not the intensity of pain. Celebrity and money spare nobody when it comes to suffering, and that is exactly why her story moves me: it proves the personal ring has no VIP lounge, you suffer, or you fight, or both.

Why I had to release this track

Like Katy borrows its title from that convergence — not from a career hit — because Roar, By the Grace of God, the interviews where she names depression and dark thoughts after breakups, that is personal material, and I am not copying, I am recognising, translating my lived experience next to hers, like two fighters on different rings facing the same family of waves. The track came like a charge I could no longer hold, and composing was the weapon I asked nobody else for, emptying what the rain held back — fear, anger, fatigue, memory of divorce, loneliness after The Takeover — while sharing was asserting that the CEO who “holds” sometimes wavers, and that roaring is a fight. I did not write Like Katy to compare myself to a star; I wrote it because her personal lived experience told me: you are not ridiculous for hurting, you are not weak for trembling, and you do not need to be famous for your storm to be real. On days when rain returned, I turned the volume up, not to deny but to accompany, roar with, then put feet back in the arena, and offering this track was also offering a hand to those who write me after the journal — merchants, tertiary independents, exiles — and to those who believe “people like Katy” do not really suffer: they suffer, we suffer, the difference is the noise around, not the blow. Like Katy closes a sequence — visibility, then inner storm — without washing the first, because you can be watched and drowning the same month: she lived it under spotlights, I, in the relative shadow of an unknown builder, and it is the same autobiographical truth.

Freeing the thought

The Komby album is quasi-autobiographical, and Like Katy is the battle scar where I stop pretending everything is fine — and where I name why this title: not Katy Perry's pro, her personal trials, and the convergence with mine. On France Je Te Quitte, I have told other storms — courts, betrayals, exiles — ; Higher carries the breakup, I Left My Fears Behind carries the new start, and here, it is the rain that follows, and the cry that refuses to go quiet. If you want to understand where the stubbornness comes from, also read how I got the idea to create Digital CHR. In the background, this trial fed empathy: merchants and tertiary trades go through their storms too, and Make It Easy is also not adding rain to those who already have enough. Komby kept going while I learned to roar — like Katy, without her celebrity, with the same demand not to stay at the bottom.

Like Katy. Ninth battle scar. The track you listen to when the storm is inside you — and you need to know she also went through it among the most visible of us, without ever becoming less real for the invisible.

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Alexandre Auger — CEO of Komby

*Step 9/14 — Previous: The Takeover (08) · Next: Study Case (10)*