“After a decade of feeling like I’d become a caricature of myself in some ways, he was like: ‘I really want to know what’s going on deep inside of you,’” she says. Kesha credits the zen-like Rubin for creating an environment where she felt comfortable enough to reveal herself emotionally. ‘I’m always cognisant of the litigation even when I’m just telling the truth’ … Kesha is stripped bare on Gag Order. I also realised that there’s an element of people-pleasing in just trying to give people what they want from me.” ![]() As the woman who wrote Tik Tok and ‘the party don’t start until I walk in’, I didn’t think anyone needed or wanted that side of my psyche. “I was doing a disservice to the whole of my being. “I realised that I, almost to the point of toxic positivity, was trying to really amplify that side of my personality,” she says, utilising, as she does throughout our interview, the language of therapy and self-help teachings. In stark contrast, the tellingly titled Gag Order – a plain-speaking, minimal record that touches on death, depression, emotional exploitation, control, hope and a battle for the truth – sheds so many layers that only the core remains. But Kesha’s early, defining songs were pushed through a default filter that read as “fun and numb”, a sound she felt compelled to return to on 2020’s muddled High Road, with its partial reclamation of her party girl persona. “When I’m finished, they won’t even know your name,” she sings at one point. Muzzled in interviews for fear of jeopardising her ongoing legal case, she managed to hint at her emotional state on the album’s lead single, Praying. Still signed to Gottwald’s label, Kemosabe Records, an imprint of Sony, she eventually released her third album, the rockier, more inward-looking Rainbow in 2017. Instead of what other people want or expect, this was about what truly needs to be excavated from inside of meĬreatively, Kesha was left in limbo. In 2016, Kesha’s case was dismissed, and Gottwald – who has always denied the allegations – sued for defamation. Later that year she filed a lawsuit against Dr Luke (real name Lukasz Gottwald), claiming he had sexually and emotionally abused her over a 10-year period. Then, in 2014, the party stopped: Kesha dropped the dollar sign from her name and checked herself into rehab for an eating disorder. Critics hated her while her fiercely loyal fans, or Animals, connected to her outsider spirit, and the hits – all of them made with Pink and Katy Perry producer Dr Luke – kept coming. Having blazed a trail through the pop cosmos in late 2009 via messy, hedonistic banger Tik Tok, all smeared glitter, sexual liberation and talk of brushing her teeth “with a bottle of Jack”, Kesha (or Ke$ha as she was then) was the perfect soundtrack for a disfranchised generation pepped up on post-recession nihilism. I share a lot of ugly emotions on this album.” The ones that are more scary, and more vulnerable, and more insecure. “The ones that I want to never talk about, that I never want to share with the greater public. “With this album I actually got to get really intimate and expose the sides of myself that I’m not the most proud of,” she says, shuffling for a comfy spot on her bed, her laptop wobbling as she lays down on her side. It heralds an album quite unlike anything the 36-year-old LA-native, born Kesha Rose Sebert, has released before. “I searched for answers all my life / Dead in the dark, I saw the light,” she sings over wheezing synths and a distant bass rumble that eventually breaks like a clap of thunder. That night inspired Eat the Acid, the deeply hallucinatory, minor-key lead single from her Rick Rubin-produced fifth album, Gag Order. “I was like: ‘What the fuck are you talking about? You’re saying what I’ve been doing therapy for, and meditating for, and searching for, was to have an incredibly surreal, terrifying, nearly psychedelic experience?’ They were all, like: ‘Yep, that’s the goal.’” “I woke up in the morning and called all my healthcare workers and explained what happened, and they all said: ‘Oh that’s a spiritual awakening, congratulations.’” She shakes her head. One night, after weeks of looking for answers, she started hearing “what some might call God, what some might call your higher consciousness” via a two-hour-long, completely sober encounter she initially mistook for a psychotic break. Having spent the early lockdown months paralysed by anxiety and consumed by the weight of both personal and global trauma, she suddenly felt “overwhelmed by so many things I hadn’t taken the time to stop and think about”. ![]() I n April 2020, months after the release of her fourth album, High Road, Kesha had a “beautiful and terrifying” spiritual awakening.
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