by the time he heard Kesha’s demo. In 2005,
she signed with Gottwald’s production compa-
ny, Kasz Money, and his publishing company,
Prescription Songs. He landed her a feature on
Flo Rida’s “Right Round,” a Hot 100 No. 1, and
major labels came knocking. By 2009, she had
signed a recording contract with RCA; in 2011,
when Gottwald founded Kemosabe, she joined
the Sony imprint.
Kesha says that her earlier hits’ connection
to that time in her life hasn’t tainted them for
her. “When I play some of the poppier songs,
people lose their shit, and those songs are my
babies too,” she says. “It brings me so much
joy to see people boogie and have the best
time with their friends, and I shouldn’t take
that away from myself.” But songs like “Die
Young” in particular — as she has claimed
in a since-deleted tweet — she felt forced to
record and include on her albums, often in
place of ones she felt better aligned with her
own vision.
Over the course of making the new album,
Kesha says, she proved to herself that she
could find a balance between her early style
and her more recent, introspective inclina-
tions. “Emotions are forever,” she says. “Part of
this album is resurrecting the fact that you can
be a fucking mess in your head one day, and
then you can also be glittered-up and have the
best night of your life.”
Speaking of which: Kesha may have ma-
tured beyond her early brush-my-teeth-with-
a-bottle-of-Jack vibe, but she’s not entirely
tamed. Since finishing the Rainbow tour, she
has caught bucket-list shows by Neil Young
and Willie Nelson (she calls both the “real
deal”) and enjoyed the occasional night out.
“They are more few and far between than they
were, let’s say, at 21 years old,” she admits.
“But I’m not dead.”
One night in particular, Kesha and her crew
went to see Elton John’s farewell tour in Los
Angeles. The experience inspired a song with a
piano intro that morphs into a bass-thumping
anthem for a girls’ night. “I, of course, stand
for so many things,” says Kesha. “But some-
times you just want to escape into a happy
motherfucking song. It’s like a three-minute
vacation, and I want to give that to people
because I know I need that sometimes. Every
time I’m sad, I put on [Carly Rae Jepsen’s]
‘Call Me Maybe.’ Every single time.” Lately, she
has been listening to “positive, badass women”
like Cardi B, Lizzo, Ariana Grande and Swift,
who in 2016 donated $250,000 to help Kesha
with her legal fees. (The two remain close
friends.) “She has amazing integrity,” says
Kesha of Swift.
RCA president of A&R Keith Naftaly has
worked with Kesha for her entire career, and
he believes that she can easily return to the
same pop stratosphere that these women
currently rule. “Even in a hip-hop-dominated
landscape, Kesha will strike a chord with a
contemporary global pop audience because
her lyrics are right on time,” he says, point-
ing to how honest and specific storytelling
like hers has been crucial to the success of
RCA artists like Khalid, SZA and H.E.R. Plus,
notes Naftaly, Kesha’s audience is still incred-
ibly young.
“When ‘Tik Tok’ and ‘Your Love Is My Drug’
and ‘Take It Off ’ came out, her audience was
like, 9,” he says. “So now, a lot of her die-hard
fans are in their early 20s, while a lot of her
peers and their audiences have shifted into
more of an adult-contemporary context.” Kes-
ha, for her part, admits that she’s “not a 21-year-
old bitch anymore, [but] I can still go onstage
in assless chaps because I want to. And maybe
one day, when everything is sagging and I don’t
want to wear assless chaps anymore, I can sit on
a stool and play country music.”
That isn’t just a pipe dream. Kesha says she
writes sad country songs all the time and is
saving them for future release. (She has so
much new music that she has lost track of how
many songs she has written.) Naftaly says she
“already has a gorgeous folk album that is just
waiting for its moment to shine.” How and
when that is all released, of course, depends on
what happens after her next court date.
Though no one interviewed for this story
would so much as speak his name, Kesha as of
2016 owed Gottwald three more albums on her
original contract (as Kemosabe went dormant
in 2017, Gottwald has no title there, though he
still profits from any of its remaining releases).
Rainbow was one and the coming record will
be two, which leaves her with one more to
go — unless, of course, a judge decides to ter-
minate her contract early. (Neither Kesha nor
Jack Rovner, her longtime manager at Vector
Management, would reveal a post-contract
plan; like his client, Rovner says he is focused
on her forthcoming album.)
In the meantime, fans will hear a “Pray-
ing”-esque song on that new album. It’s about
growing up without a father, contemplating
having children (she has been with partner
Brad Ashenfelter for nearly six years) and
wondering if having a dad around would have
protected her from “all the bad shit, the bad
men.” She wrote it shortly after her late busi-
ness manager, a beloved father figure whom
she prefers not to name, passed away — around
the same time that, in need of a change, she
decided to go brunette.
“Everything goes up and down, and I think
it probably will for the rest of my life,” she
says, lifting her heart-shaped Gucci sunglasses
to catch a tear. “So you ride the highs, and you
write songs about an awesome night where
you go and meet Elton John and get fucked up
and lose your phone in the Uber, and some-
52 BILLBOARD • SEPTEMBER 28, 2019