Firework

This inspirational dance jam is the third single from American singer-songwriter Katy Perry's third studio album, Teenage Dream. Perry calls the song her "epitaph." She told Entertainment Weekly in 2013: "Its message has been really profound. I still love singing the song because it's not cheesy but it does its job. I feel like that song has legs."

Perry told Billboard magazine that the inspiration for the song came from an unlikely source. "Basically I have this very morbid idea... when I pass, I want to be put into a firework and shot across the sky over the Santa Barbara Ocean as my last hurrah," she said. "I want to be a firework, both living and dead. My boyfriend showed me a paragraph out of Jack Kerouac's book On The Road, about people that are buzzing and fizzing and full of life and never say a commonplace thing. They shoot across the sky like a firework and make people go, 'Ahhh.' I guess that making people go 'ahhh' is kind of like my motto."

Like several other tracks on Teenage Dream, this was inspired by Perry's love for her English fiancée, the comedian Russell Brand. The couple married in 2010 but divorced a little over a year later.