After a few minutes, Kesha emerges on camera, clad in a beige Joy Division shirt, her blonde streaked hair damp and pulled back. On the wall behind her is a framed copy of Rolling Stone with her face on the cover. She grins, buzzing with energy, ready to get into it.
“There we go,” she says. “Professional.”
Kesha has always had a freewheeling nature. It’s even more present and joyful now that her split from her longtime record label has made her, in her words, a “free woman.”
Before the call, her press flaks asked to focus on more recent developments, but Kesha, unchained and unabashed, proved willing to discuss just about anything.
She talked about her vision for a social service like Smash that aims to protect artists and foster collaboration, how she got the idea during a psychedelic trip, the tech that makes her show work (including AI, something she’s gotten heat for using before), and whether she claims her crown as the queen of recession pop.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: You’re getting ready to go on tour very soon. How are you feeling?
Kesha: Oh, I’m really excited. It’s my first US tour as a free woman, which means I actually have the legal rights to my own voice for the first time since I was 18 years old. So this is my first tour that I get to really embody that freedom, and I’m excited. I really can feel a difference.
Not to give anything away, but can you give any sort of preview of that?
You want the tea?
Yeah! Details of the show with that newfound freedom.
Totally. I think I’m healing in real time. I got my freedom a year and a couple months ago and have had to keep a lot inside during what I’ve gone through. That’s just the reality. It’s been like this surrender to imperfection. It’s very vulnerable, but it’s exciting because I feel like my fans are here for me and here for that.
So for the tour, the tea I can spill is that I’ve been healing by listening to some of my old songs that maybe have had negative connotations in my mind. In the past, I would just not play those songs, but that’s not fair to not only myself, and the song, but most of all to my fans. I’m healing my relationships with these songs, and so potentially on tour you might be hearing some healing in real time. Some songs maybe I thought I would never play again.
Any ones that you want to tease at all?
Well, I’ll just say people are going to fucking shit themselves. That’s what I’ll say.
Great. Beautiful. OK, that’s what you want in a show.
I want everyone shitting themselves in unison at Madison Square Garden.
There’s a first time for everything. You’ve got a new album coming out too. How do you think about the process of making new music on top of revisiting your old stuff? How do you balance the two efforts?
