Kesha Will Not Squander Her Second Act: ‘I Waited for This Moment My Entire Goddamn Life'

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2 days ago

'Back to regular f—king programming' is how Kesha describes her current status, as if her life and career were parts of a show that had been unexpectedly pre-empted. The interruption lasted years, and no one knew if or when the schedule was going to snap back into place. At long last, Kesha tells Billboard, it has. She's now returned to 'what I'm good at, and what I'm supposed to do. Finally.'
She uses that last word countless times in an extended conversation, and you can't blame her for doing so. After becoming the brightest new star in pop at the beginning of the 2010s thanks to turbo-charged, party-hard smash hits like 'TiK ToK,' 'We R Who We R' and the Pitbull collaboration 'Timber.' Kesha became entrenched in a series of lawsuits with the primary producer on those songs, Lukasz 'Dr. Luke' Gottwald, beginning in 2014. The pop star sued the producer for sexual assault and emotional abuse, among other allegations, and Gottwald filed a countersuit alleging defamation; while Kesha continued releasing music throughout the years of litigation, multiple attempts to be released from her contract with Gottwald's RCA Records imprint, Kemosabe Records, were unsuccessful.
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In May 2023, Kesha released Gag Order, a dark, despondent exploration of her trauma, with minimalist production from Rick Rubin and the image of the pop star with a blast bag over her head as its album artwork. One month after the release of the album (which has since been re-christened Eat The Acid on streaming services), Kesha and Gottwald announced that they had reached a settlement in a joint statement.
Although the years-long legal battle was resolved, Kesha would have to wait until March 2024 for her contract with Kemosabe Records to officially expire — but once it did, she sprinted forward. The pop star set up her own label, Kesha Records; released 'Joyride,' an unhinged electro-pop single which became a viral hit last summer and hit the top 10 of the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart; and worked closely with the pop producer Zhone (Troye Sivan, Kylie Minogue) on an album she describes as 'sonically liberated.'
Period, not-so-subtly being released on Independence Day, is both a return to form for Kesha as a collection of brash, celebratory bangers with its ringleader's tongue planted firmly in her cheek, as well as full-length with more depth and wisdom than the singles collections of her 'TiK ToK' days. Tucked in between the arena-ready choruses and revved-up synths are serious messages of hard-fought peace ('It rained all year, but it's clearing up/ I'm flying high, it's a miracle,' she sings on 'Yippiee-Ki-Yay') and belatedly acknowledged self-worth (the powerful closing track, 'Cathedral,' finds Kesha searching for a place of worship for years, then discovering it in the mirror).
'For anybody who's survived anything difficult, hopefully it can be an album that they can put on and think, 'If she can get through something and find this place of joy, then I can do that, too,'' Kesha says of Period. As triumphant as the album is, Kesha sounds even giddier when speaking about it. 'Other people think success or money or thinking dating a hot person is the best revenge — it's none of that. It's happiness.'
Below, Kesha talks about putting Period together, as well as what might await her life and career from here.
When you thought about this album as a statement, how difficult was it to find a balance between putting out a personally significant piece of art and putting out fun, uptempo songs?
Honestly, it wasn't difficult. The challenging part was deciding which songs I wanted to put on the record. I grew up as a punk — I like a fast song, I like getting in and out, I like an album with no skips. So the hard part was trying to figure out which of the songs that I've written this year go on which projects. I just write so many songs — all day, all night, in my sleep. There are so many songs.
When I was putting this album together, I wanted to reclaim my joy on my own terms. My entire life, my body of work, every song I put out, there has been some sort of energetic or contractual caveat to it, [as if it's] not feeling wholly and completely mine. When you hear enough times how the success of what you're doing is probably due to somebody else, you start to internalize that.
So I went into this project being like, 'I'm going to do this on my own, through my label. I'm going to write every single one of my songs, I'm going to produce it, I'm going to executive produce it. I'm going to be in charge of every f—king little thing.' So the successes and the failures, they are my responsibility — but I also can bathe in it being my creation. That's been a really cool experience, to feel like this is me, 100 f—king percent, for the first time in my career, at 38 years old. I have nobody trying to convince me to do something, and having me question what I want to say and how I want to say it.
In a way, it feels like I get to revisit that space that I entered the world of music with, that I think is what connected me to the world. I have a sense of humor about life. I fancy myself, at times, leaning towards Zen Buddhism, and there's a humor to my God, and there's a humor to all of the absurdities of life. But it's engrained in my spiritual practice as well that you have to laugh at all of this — like the lyric in 'Happy,' 'Gotta just laugh so I don't die.'
I really enjoy being unbridled and joyful and celebratory and silly and having fun, but what I've realized is, in order to get to that space, you have to first feel safe. There are basic human needs, to feel safe enough to then play or dance or make jokes. So I had to work really f—king hard to get to this place of safety, and now I can get back to doing what I do best — which is being a little f—khead that likes to create chaos and giggle about it across the world.
Did that hands-on approach to the album, and amount of creative control, ever feel daunting?
No! I'd been working for over a decade. When 'Timber' was the biggest song in the world, I made a choice — and I stopped being the thing that I never intended on being, which was a woman who's onstage preaching about self-love, who behind-the-scenes is not feeding herself, trying to please everyone except for herself, spiraling about this internalized shame that has been projected onto her by a bunch of external forces. I was trying to portray this image and ideal of what a pop star should be, when that's not who I am. I'm a very specific, strange creature, and I found myself embodying everything that I don't stand for.
There have been micro-ways that I have taken my power back in my career, but finally, this past year has been the first time that I could literally jump in my car and go do whatever the f—k I want with my body, my voice and my face, and I was like, 'Get everybody the f—k out of my way.' It was not daunting. I waited for this moment my entire g—damn life.
Me and Zhone went to Mexico, and I was like, 'Zhone, we are gonna go look for stingrays, I'm gonna go try to swim with some sharks, and then we're gonna go back in the room and record the rest of the vocals for 'The One.' And then we're gonna drink a beer by the pool, and then I'm gonna jump in the ocean. You can do whatever you want, but from 6:00 'til 7:00, I will be having ocean time.' That's how we made the record, that's the way I wanted to make the record, and I think that's why you hear so much joy.
Why swimming with sharks?
Probably from spending too much time in the music business, I feel really comfortable swimming with sharks. [Laughs.] That's my happy place — it makes me feel calm and peaceful. I'd do that as a morning meditation, and then we'd work for a long time, and then he would do whatever he wanted to, and I would go do my witchy s—t with the ocean and talk to the universe. Then we would reconvene the next day. It was amazing.
To that point, you sound relaxed throughout the whole album, and comfortable in the moments that contain a greater sense of gravity — like the opener 'Freedom,' which is your longest song to date at nearly six and a half minutes, and the closer 'Cathedral,' on which you sing, 'I'm the savior, I'm the altar, I'm the Holy Ghost,' and you let your voice vibrate on that line in such an interesting way.
I really do feel like it's been a homecoming in a lot of ways — not only legally, to the rights of my voice, but to letting go of that internalized shame, of letting all that go and coming home to my own body, my joy, myself. And part of that has been healing my relationship with the records that I've put out that were difficult to make — that were perceived in a way that wasn't the way I intended, that were tied to events that I don't stand for.
There has been a lot of pain surrounding certain parts of my life. Letting go of that — and thinking of my body, my mind and my spirit as my cathedral — has been a really important piece of my spiritual practice. I love that song, and I loved that you connected with that song. It's one of my favorite songs I've ever written.
When did you start working on these songs?
I got a phone call on December 6 [2023], that said, 'In three months' time, you will be a free woman.' And from the moment I became a free woman, I had spent day and night in the studio, in this state of euphoric psychosis. I finally felt free, so the creative muse was just in me, in this flow state.
It's been a year and a half, and it still is so intense. I was up 'til 3:00 in the morning last night, after nine hours of rehearsal, writing another song. I feel like I've been given this gift from God, that's almost like, 'You went through the hard part, now you have your freedom, and I'm going to turn you into this channel.' That's what it's been feeling like lately.
'Joyride' was the first song you released after your previous deal ended — on Independence Day in 2024, exactly one year before . And it became this beloved fan song and viral hit.
It was really exciting. In our society, specifically for women in any sort of public-persona position, aging, the concept of time, is made to be our enemy. Growing up, I was made to believe that by 38 years old, nobody would give a f—k about me. I actually had been told the words, by the time I was free, I would be irrelevant. So to see my fans not only connecting to the music, but turning it into this like psychotic, hilarious celebration of the chaos of life, was just so healing to my f—king soul on a very deep level. It was also just like, 'Oh my God, it's not true. I'm not irrelevant! I fought this fight, and I'm free, and people do care, people are connecting.' It made me just feel like, 'Okay, keep going. Keep going.'
Was there ever a chance that this new album would be extremely angry instead of joyful — as in, once your deal was over, you'd take aim at those who had wronged you?
But that's what Eat the Acid [the alternate title for Gag Order] was. If you go back in time, the anger, the disassociation, the feelings of complete isolation, suicidal ideation — all of that, I talk about on that record. Thank God I had Rick Rubin to do that record with, because he was such a safe container for all of those emotions. Up until that point in my life, I had no place to go, and I had all of these emotions that were really overwhelming and really difficult to deal with. Of course, I would work on it with my therapist and my friends, and I would do a lot of spiritual work around it. But when I met Rick Rubin, it felt like such a relief for my system, because I could finally put it into the music.
I had this unsubstantiated idea that I just always had to be happy and keep it together in my music, before I made what is now called Eat the Acid. I got to get out all of that aggression and pain with someone who — I mean, I've never met a man that I admire more than Rick Rubin. I got to do it with my one of my heroes, and that was a really beautiful gift. And to be honest, even the way that album performed at the time was painful, but I can now see in hindsight that it led me to my newly found freedom.
How do you see the next few years of your career playing out, especially now that you're in such a creative groove?
Now that I've made it through the battle of a lifetime, what I have emerged with is my name, and I hope that my name can stand for integrity in this world and in this business. So I'm just choosing really carefully where to place that name, and right now, it's with Kesha Records, my label. It's with my tour, and it's in my app called Smash, that will create community for artists and music makers so they can connect, collaborate and hire each other for their services. A big issue in the music business is the gatekeeping of contacts, art not being valued, and artists not getting paid what they should be paid to be the icons that we worship in our times of joy and sorrow. So I'm trying to work on that behind the scenes.
I'm teaching songwriting. I want to travel the world and teach the thing that has saved my life to as many other people as possible. I think that my life purpose is creating community, and a safe place for people to play. On my tour, I want everyone to come and feel like it's a safe place for them to play and be celebrated exactly as they are. I'm just excited to see where the world's going to take me.
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