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Before Kesha got The Call, she was frolicking naked with her friends off the coast of Zihuatanejo, Mexico—a sun-kissed Lady Godiva on a jet ski, cutting through the ocean waves. Her entourage of 12 friends followed her lead, shedding their beachwear to evade tan lines as they scanned the water for sharks and manta rays.
It was the pop star’s 37th birthday and the dawning of her most liberated year yet. “I got a big wake-up call to start living like a free woman,” she says of the divine intervention. “But I also got a literal phone call.” That one had happened three months earlier, when her lawyers phoned to say that it was official: On March 6, her birthday, for the first time in 19 years, Kesha would reclaim the legal rights to her own voice.
Kesha was just 18 years old in 2005 when she first signed an ill-fated six-album deal with songwriter and music producer Lukasz Gottwald, better known as Dr. Luke. Nine years later, Kesha dropped a bombshell when she filed a civil suit against Dr. Luke for infliction of emotional distress, sexual harassment, and assault.
Gottwald, famous for his work with superstars like Katy Perry and Rihanna, denied the allegations and filed a defamation suit against Kesha in 2014. Kesha, still beholden to the terms she signed at 18, continued to release albums to fulfill her contractual obligations—the last of which was released in May of 2023. A chilling kiss-off of a record, produced by Rick Rubin, it was cheekily titled Gag Order.
Coat, shorts, Stella McCartney. Necklace, David Yurman. Sunglasses, Tom Ford.
After nearly a decade spent sparring in courtrooms through a procession of lawyers, in June 2023, Kesha and Dr. Luke reached a settlement that would dismiss Dr. Luke’s defamation claim against Kesha, which by that point was all that remained of their lawsuits against each other. (When announcing the settlement, both parties continued to deny any misconduct.) Since then, Kesha has gained full autonomy over her future music and recordings, allowing her to work freely with any producers of her choosing.
In the months since, she’s founded her own label called Kesha Records, and released a new hit single, “Joyride.” She’s now hard at work on a new album, becoming the godmother of the next generation of pop stars, and has a 10-year plan to upend the industry. “The music industry should be fucking terrified of me,” Kesha says. “Because I’m about to make some major moves and shift this shit. I really want to dismantle it piece by piece and shine light into every corner. I hope my legacy is making sure it never happens to anybody ever again.”
On a sweltering August afternoon in Los Angeles, Kesha sits across from me on a leather couch inside the Village studios in West Hollywood, where Fleetwood Mac, Heart, and Whitney Houston once recorded legendary records. She wears a T-shirt promoting her new record label—“KESHA RECORDS, BITCH,” it reads in huge yellow letters—and a pair of seersucker overalls, bedecked with several smiley face buttons for flair. It’s here that Kesha’s been fine-tuning songs for her very first album as an independent artist. “I’m free and it feels good,” she says. “I have a reminder in my phone that says: ‘You’re free.’”
Under the direction of trailblazing hyper-pop producers A. G. Cook (Charli xcx) and Zhone (Slayyyter), Kesha’s stadium-size dance-pop bombast is delicately imbued with the barbed metallic accents popularized by Cook’s label-slash-milieu, PC Music. Although she hasn’t named her record yet, three words cycle periodically like mantras throughout our interview: freedom, safety, and most importantly, joy.
“This record is my little wild child,” Kesha says with an impish grin. “My last record that came out, Gag Order, was me giving the more painful emotions a voice. I was really vulnerable. Now I’m really trying to make way for the bad bitch. I’m giving her the moment—because we need the space to have all the emotions safely. I capture the empowered emotions, so that I can listen back to it when I’m not feeling that way.”
Propelled by a taunting loop of polka-style horn samples, “Joyride” is a campy libertine dream transmuted into song. Lyrics like “Rev my engine till you make it purr” call back to the Kesha we met in 2009: a glitter-streaked weekend warrior with a party-girl ethos that verged on a death drive. “You know the Buddhist saying that life is pain? I found that to be very true in my life,” she continues, sipping on a paper cup of green tea. “Everybody knows me as a fun human being. My soul is very fun. My name means ‘innocent joy.’ But, you know, there’s only so much somebody can take before just feeling wrecked….My soul needs this album. I need to reclaim my joy. Because I fought so fucking long and hard for it.”
To Kesha, there is not only life after surviving a very public trauma, there is room for dessert. “I really think that my joy is such a feminist act of defiance,” she says. “And to everyone who has supported me, and to anyone who’s a survivor out there, know that the energy of support toward me also flows through me to them.” Released pointedly on Independence Day of this year, “Joyride” is a grown and sexy work of opera-pop that’s been brewing in Kesha’s brain since that divine call made its way to her in Mexico. “The second it came out of my mouth, I was like, ‘This is my first single.’ It was me busting the door back down and saying, ‘No, no, it’s time to party again!’ We’re going to start with having fun, and then I’m going to try to dismantle all the shady shit.”
The song was written not only after her legal dispute had been settled, but also in the aftermath of her last relationship, which yielded fewer rewards for her than being alone. “I had a feeling that he was in it for the wrong reasons and was a bit of a starfucker,” Kesha says of her ex. “I decided to test that theory and took one of my friends instead of him to Taylor Swift’s party. He came over the next day and broke up with me.”
Coat, The Frankie Shop. Shirt, pants, The Attico. Belt, The Leather Man. Earrings, Completedworks.
If she still believes in romance—and she says she does—she feels best equipped to give that love to herself. “I’m only going to enter into a partnership again if someone treats me as well as I treat myself,” she says. “I kept hearing people say, ‘I’m looking for The One.’ I kept waiting for somebody else to fill that space, and then I just stepped into it myself. You gotta be all those things to yourself—your own boyfriend, sugar daddy, rich husband, best friend, cheerleader. I started taking myself on vacations, buying myself six dozen roses, and taking myself for shopping sprees at Saint Laurent. Yes, I take myself on fucking really bougie dates, like really celebrating the fuck out of myself. Then “Joyride” started being written in my mind. I was like, God, I am The One, though.”
And even if she compares dating in Los Angeles to “digging through the garbage,” she hasn’t written off the possibility of falling in love again. “Can I use this ELLE interview as, like, my version of a dating app?” she asks. “Get the hot pictures poppin’….Let’s see who we get. Anybody want to change the world?”
Kesha was born Kesha Rose Sebert in Los Angeles and raised in Nashville by Patricia “Pebe” Sebert, a single mom, who worked as a country singer-songwriter. One of Pebe’s most well-known songs, “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You,” cowritten with Hugh Moffatt, was made famous by Dolly Parton on her 1980 album Dolly, Dolly, Dolly. “She’s an iconic songwriter,” says Kesha of her mother, adding that she is hoping to put out an album her mom made in the 1980s under her new label.
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Pebe supported her daughter as she pursued her passions—like studying comparative religion at a Columbia University summer program—and rode shotgun on her road to fame, cowriting some of Kesha’s most colossal hits, such as 2010’s “Your Love Is My Drug.” She also shepherded Kesha through many years of legal strife and public scrutiny, not to mention the time her daughter spent in recovery from an eating disorder.
After featuring on Flo Rida’s number one hit from 2009, “Right Round,” Kesha rocketed to stardom at lightning speed; that same year, “TiK ToK,” her debut single as a solo artist, shot up to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and remained there for nine consecutive weeks. The song became the longest-running number one debut by a woman since Debby Boone’s 1977 ballad “You Light Up My Life.” Kesha continued her winning streak for over a decade, with four albums hitting the top 10 of the Billboard 200 albums chart. Her outstanding commercial success, however, could not eclipse the anguish she’d experienced, as her legal disputes with Dr. Luke began to feel like a referendum on her humanity.
Her mom “held my hand through this whole process,” Kesha says, but support from other women in the industry felt harder to come by in her early years. “When I was coming up, I wished there was some woman in pop music that I could have reached out to and talked to about stuff I was going through,” she says. “I found more support from the rock boys—Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl, Pat Smear, and Alice Cooper were very real, and helped me talk through things. So now I try to reach out to artists, girls and women, and just offer my services of life experience.”
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By 2016, though, there were glimmers of a sea change in the industry. Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, and Kelly Clarkson all showed solidarity with Kesha on social media. “I’d like to take this moment to publicly support Kesha,” said Adele that year at the BRIT Awards. Taylor Swift donated $250,000 toward Kesha’s legal fees.
Now that she can put all of that behind her, she is fiercely dedicated to her own well-being. She drives to the ocean daily when she’s in town, just to jump in. She does acupuncture, she meditates, she journals, she juices, she goes to dance classes, she has microdosed mushrooms for PTSD. “Oh, it’s a whole thing,” Kesha says. “Being in myself after the life I have led is a fucking full-time job, and self-care is my number one most important thing. Because if I want to be making music, all of this has to come first. I prioritize myself.”
Although she wouldn’t have known it 10 years ago, Kesha’s perseverance and punk ethos have helped raise a growing brigade of gutsy, empowered women in American pop music, who are eager to represent themselves authentically to a new generation of fans who are more queer, feminist, and progressive than ever before. “I do have a sense of feeling protective of young women in music,” she says, adding that she DMs other artists to offer herself as a sounding board. “I really hope my joy can stand for others to know that it’s available to them and to not give up. I enjoy feeling my power, which hasn’t been available to me for a really long time, and I’d love to give that gift to others if I can.”
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The two brightest lights in her periphery, she says, are superstars Reneé Rapp and Chappell Roan. “Reneé is the most genuinely cool, calm, unbothered, iconic pop girlie,” says Kesha, whom Rapp invited to perform at her show in Brooklyn in November 2023. The two reconnected this past April at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, where Kesha dropped by Rapp’s set to perform “TiK ToK.”
Prior to their performance, the women discussed a remix of Kesha’s original opening line—“Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy”—to condemn the disgraced music mogul, Sean Combs, who was indicted on sex trafficking charges in September, and faces multiple lawsuits alleging sexual assault and harassment. “Wake up in the morning like FUCK P. Diddy,” Kesha and Rapp shouted in unison, to the approval of thousands of screaming fans.
The decision to make the switch “was pretty quick and easy for the both of us,” Rapp tells me over the phone. “Diddy is such a fucking asshole. So many men who were working prominently at that time were such disgraceful shames of human beings. Kesha certainly doesn’t put up with any shit, and I most definitely don’t put up with any shit.”
“She raised an entire generation of ‘fuck the man’-like girls,” Rapp continues. “You would have to genuinely go out of your way and hate yourself not to like her.” Over private messages on Instagram, Kesha has offered Rapp a safe space to process music industry woes and seek advice. “When I was the same age in my career, I was so stressed,” Kesha says. “Reneé has this really beautiful confidence of knowing exactly who the fuck she is. It’s inspiring to see women be exactly who they are, and still be so supportive.”
Kesha and Rapp later met Chappell Roan at Lollapalooza, after she played to reportedly the biggest daytime crowd that the festival has ever seen. Whereas many people would see this as a wish fulfilled for Roan, Kesha clocked the stress in her eyes. “Kesha was so lovely to me after my Lollapalooza set,” Roan tells me later. “Because with that huge of a crowd, maybe only five other people there understood what that’s like. Kesha came to talk to me after, and it felt like a big sister was helping me through it. Me and Reneé were crying because we felt like we were seen in a way we never had been before.”
“Kesha has always stood up for women and what she believes in,” Roan adds, “and that’s very inspiring.”
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As executive of her own independent label, published through Warner Chappell Music, Kesha is ushering in what she calls her “music mogul era.” “I am just 100 percent in complete control of everything now,” she marvels. “It’s exciting to be represented the way I want to be: ideating the song, writing the song, singing the song, comping the song, coproducing the song, marketing the song, designing what I’m wearing for the song…calling my friend Kyle Richards to borrow a Birkin, or calling my friend Jonathan Wilson to borrow a Porsche for the shoot.”
In time, she hopes to build upon her role as a guru of sorts by signing and developing new pop talent to her label. So far, she’s managed to fill the role with aplomb; in January, she taught a songwriting course called The Alchemy of Pop Music at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. She gave a TED Talk of a similar name in July. “I wear a lot of hats, but I have a very big hat closet, so it’s fine,” Kesha says.
She is also working on her long-term plan to correct the wrongs of the music industry, once and for all. She’d like to start by tackling the dubious terms of contracts offered to artists—some of which claim rights to songs, lyrics, and even likenesses in perpetuity. “I don’t believe in ownership in perpetuity of anyone, anything, on any level, in any business,” she says. “That should not be something a human being can commit to.”
“I’m allergic to control—it gives me a visceral reaction,” she continues. “I feel like people want to own a beautiful thing. And it sucks for them, but you just can’t! We live in a time that’s more democratic. People can share whatever they want on all these different platforms. I’m excited to see what that means for the future of music—what the future of the world sounds like.”
Kesha says that, with help from those in the tech industry, she’s devising a digital platform where an artist’s safety is prioritized, instead of being sacrificed for the commercial gain of others. In fiercely championing herself for the past decade, she has grown more and more into the champion that pop music needed—and it starts with protecting artists from the kinds of predators who almost snuffed out her light.
“I don’t believe you can create if you’re not feeling safe,” she says. “The old guard, they’re falling. The old way of doing everything with secrecy—there’s no future there. So, like, those of you with deep, dark secrets, you better fucking run.”
Hair by Riad Azar at the Only Agency; makeup by Ozzy Salvatierra at Lowe & Co.; photographed on location at Conrad Los Angeles.
This article appears in the November 2024 issue of ELLE.
Suzy Exposito is an award-winning music and culture journalist based in Los Angeles. She has worked as a culture columnist at the L.A. Times, and was previously the founding Latin music editor for the legendary rock magazine Rolling Stone. She served as an executive consultant on the 2023 Netflix series Neon, a comedy detailing the ins and outs of the music industry in Miami. Her writing has also been featured in Vogue, GQ, and Pitchfork.