In April 2020, months after the release of her fourth album, High Road, Kesha had a “beautiful and terrifying” spiritual awakening. 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”. 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.
“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. “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.’”
That night inspired Eat the Acid, the deeply hallucinatory, minor-key lead single from her Rick Rubin-produced fifth album, Gag Order. “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. It heralds an album quite unlike anything the 36-year-old LA-native, born Kesha Rose Sebert, has released before. “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. “The ones that I want to never talk about, that I never want to share with the greater public. The ones that are more scary, and more vulnerable, and more insecure. I share a lot of ugly emotions on this album.”
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. 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. Then, in 2014, the party stopped: Kesha dropped the dollar sign from her name and checked herself into rehab for an eating disorder. 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. In 2016, Kesha’s case was dismissed, and Gottwald – who has always denied the allegations – sued for defamation.
Creatively, Kesha was left in limbo. 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. 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. “When I’m finished, they won’t even know your name,” she sings at one point. 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.
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. “I realised that I, almost to the point of toxic positivity, was trying to really amplify that [playful] side of my personality,” she says, utilising, as she does throughout our interview, the language of therapy and self-help teachings. “I was doing a disservice to the whole of my being. 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 also realised that there’s an element of people-pleasing in just trying to give people what they want from me.”
Kesha credits the zen-like Rubin for creating an environment where she felt comfortable enough to reveal herself emotionally. “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. “So he just made this super cosy space where instead of thinking about what other people want, or what other people expect, or what’s going to make other people happy, it was about what truly needs to be excavated from inside of me.”
Things started slowly, however, with the first three weeks defined by extended emotional purging. “I would walk in every day and for approximately two hours I would cry and he would just create space,” she says. “He never once asked me to stop crying, or to get it together. It just took me a minute to put a voice to these really unpleasant, embarrassing emotions. I don’t want to be seen as weak, or fucked up, or unhappy, because overall in my life … I have all the emotions.”
If Kesha’s early career, publicly at least, was defined by hedonistic abandon, it was also anchored by a fierce honesty in her interviews that set her apart from her more polished contemporaries. So while Gag Order is deeply raw and emotionally hyper-specific in places, it is disconcerting to be presented with a version of Kesha that has to tread incredibly carefully. Legally, with Gottwald’s defamation case to be heard in July, there is a lot she can’t talk about and her answers are occasionally euphemistic or stop-start. On Fine Line, the album’s defining track, she appears to tackle this head on. “All the doctors and lawyers cut the tongue out of my mouth / I’ve been hiding my anger, but bitch look at me now” she sings over rolling piano, distorted screams and plucked harp.
When I mention those lyrics, and this disconnect between pure honesty and enforced silence, she shifts to sit upright. A stuffed toy replica (made by her mother) of her beloved cat, Mr Peeps, nestled beside her for “moral support” (this is the first interview she’s done for the album, a fact she nervously mentions multiple times), is now brought close to her chest. “I wrote the line, I sang the line, so it’s only fair I’m going to be questioned about the line,” she says slowly. “I feel like having to … I feel like …” She starts again: “Since I was a little kid I just was so free and I really do think that’s why my fans connected so much to me. Like, ‘This is who I am, I don’t really care what you think, it is what it is.’ And I have almost, like …” She stops and asks for a moment to collect her thoughts. “I have nothing but the truth,” she eventually says, the words caught up in a deep sigh. “I have that. Across the board. To have to run a filter through everything I say … is … like the way I’m talking now … To have to look at it from so many directions when I have nothing to hide is incredibly … exhausting.”
I ask if the lyrics also have to go through such a legal filter, which immediately seems like a stupid question given how raw and honest she is on the album. So I’m relieved when she refers to her music as a “sanctuary” and “a completely free space”. But, as we continue to chat about Fine Line and how it lays everything out there, she suddenly circles back. “Erm, yeah, after the songs are completed I do have … People do go through it,” she says. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this. I’m always cognisant of the ongoing litigation even when I’m just telling the truth about how I’m feeling. Hence the title of the album.”
The sadness of the moment hangs heavy. “We each have a purpose of some sort,” she says calmly. “Not in some religious way at all, I just mean if you zoom out, the universe doesn’t want us to be miserable.” It’s a sort of spiritual, slightly bohemian take fostered during an upbringing she describes as “really wild from the beginning”. Kesha was born to a single mum, the singer-songwriter Pebe Sebert (she never knew her dad), and raised on the road both in LA and then later Nashville. Her early life jarred with those of her classmates, and the family often lived off food stamps (the dollar sign in her name was ironic). Later, this meant that Kesha’s pop personality was defined by a raw edge and an intriguing sense of outsiderdom. “It was always: ‘Huh? Are you sure? Me?’ I grew up on the Stooges, they’re my favourite band; so then to be in the echelon of super pop singers was flattering but I felt the same way I did in high school where it was like some people are cheerleaders and I’m the geek who has the weird art band,” she laughs.
When she moved back to LA to sign her deal with Gottwald as a teenager, she spent the first few years partying and living the life she would later write about on debut album, Animal. There was a lot of hard work, too, and lots to prove, which is why she won’t allow this entire era to be tarred by what’s happened. “No one should ever take [those songs] away from me because I made them, I incubated them, I birthed them into the world,” she says. “And I sang them for fucking 15 years, so that’s a part of me. I remember riding my bicycle from Echo Park to downtown LA, getting on a subway for two hours to Long Beach, and then riding my bike for three miles to producer David Gamson’s house. I would see people playing with their own poop on the subway – it was not a cute scene. Then I’d ride my bike up a fucking mountain to get home, every day, to write some songs.” She looks me dead in the eye: “That album is mine. I put my heart and soul into it, so of course I look back with mostly affinity. No one can rip that away from me.”
Her frankness around drinking, partying and the uselessness of the opposite sex also set the tone for a subsequent era of pop from female artists tinged by hardcore self-annihilation (think Bangerz-era Miley, or I Love It-era Charli XCX). But for Kesha that rebelliousness soon calcified into a caricature around 2012’s Warrior, with critics taking aim at what they saw as vapid lyrics from a singer who needed lashings of Auto-Tune. On Gag Order, however, those raw edges that used to be given a quick studio polish are left unvarnished. It took some getting used to.
“It got ingrained into me in the younger years of my career that I needed Auto-Tune,” she says. “Like I needed it. So I remember talking to Rick and the engineer and saying, ‘You have to put Auto-Tune on it.’ We had a back and forth that blew my mind; they were like, ‘You don’t need Auto-Tune.’ In my mind it felt like this mild addiction to this thing that fixed me, almost like a filter on a photo. Rick made space for the imperfections and embraced them almost to the point of making me like the parts of myself that are imperfect. You kind of have these rules that I’m learning are now an illusion. They’re bullshit. They’re so ingrained. Like you have to wear a bodysuit and be a certain size, and have Auto-Tune, and look perfect, and be perfect. All of it is an illusion.”
So much of Kesha’s life over the last three years has been about allowing herself to embrace the darkness, but lighter moments flicker through Gag Order. On the playful Only Love Can Save Us Now – a throbbing, gospel-laced electronic hoedown – she jokes “I’m getting sued because my mom has been tweeting / Don’t fucking tell me that I’m dealing with reason,” while The Drama’s all-enveloping cacophony dissipates to leave a nursery rhyme-like mantra of “In the next life I wanna come back / As a house cat, as a house cat.” She is funny, too. When discussing the album’s lack of collaborators, outside of an interlude by the late spiritual teacher and guru of modern yoga Ram Dass, she casually mentions that a friend also appears on the album. “He’s a wizard who lives outside Seattle, his name is Oberon Zell.” Literally the wizard of Oz, I say. “Yes,” she deadpans. When I mention these flashes of humour her shoulders relax. “For me that’s a coping mechanism. Sometimes life is so ludicrous and deranged that it’s like you’re living in a David Lynch movie. I like to try to make art out of my experiences even if they’re dark. And find humour in it because what the fuck else am I going to do? Even on the last song [on the album] Happy, it’s like ‘I’ve got to just laugh so I don’t die.’”
Around the release of High Road, Kesha was often asked about whether she was happy. On one occasion she said she was “fucking ecstatic” to be at a place so far removed from hurt that she could see happiness on the horizon. These recent years, with their pauses, revelations and spiritual reckonings, have added a note of caution. “I have a big year coming up,” she says, a nod at July’s court case. “There’s a lot of fear. Happiness is always going to be my goal and something I’m working towards. I have a beautiful family and a bunch of gorgeous cats, and that makes me happy. I have wonderful friends. But I’m in a lot of emotional pain. The whole point of this album is: ‘Some things are not OK, and I’ve been through some stuff that is not OK.’”
She takes a big gulp of water. “I feel like I had to be direct with the title, and the songs, and with the imagery. That’s how I feel.” She lets Mr Peeps go and leans in. “Sometimes I’m incredibly happy, and then sometimes I have panic attacks. That’s the truth. I’ve been so sick of pretending everything is all good.”
Gag Order is released on 19 May via Kemosabe Records/RCA Records.
