Kesha on 'Gag Order,' value of art over commerce, excitement about playing at The Ryman

Between the ages of 14 and 17, pop superstar Kesha was a high school student with purple hair and played brass marching band instruments at Nashville's Franklin and Brentwood High Schools and nearly achieved a perfect score on her SATs. Her mother, songwriter Pebe Sebert, has a Music City No. 1 single via Dolly Parton's version of her late-70s co-written song "Old Flames Can't Hold a Candle to You."

In her family, the level of success reached by playing two nights at The Ryman -- as Kesha is on Oct. 23 and 24 -- may rival her and her mother's combined writing bona fides, which sit in the range of 50 million units of hit singles sold in the past four decades.

The music isn't as precious to Kesha as you'd be led to believe by the ubiquity of singles like 2009's "Tik Tok," 2010's "We R Who We R" and 2012's "Die Young." She's a songwriter's songwriter who grew up in 90s country-era writing rooms with her mother and thus, almost by osmosis, acquired the gene that's allowed her to write, in her estimation, somewhere in the range of 15,000 songs in the past 20 years.

What's precious to Kesha lies within the nearly 3,000-person capacity and 131-year-old Union Tabernacle Church at 116 John Lewis Way S on Lower Broadway.

"My search for spiritual confirmation led me away from religion and more towards arbitrary career goals that I believed would make me feel whole -- albums, cars, money, fame, houses, tours, Grammy awards," Kesha told The Tennessean. "They're all incredible, but they are also a constant stream of temporary rushes of energy, like a drug."

"Now, I'm at a place in my career where I feel complete, happy and making art that has transformed my PTSD and trauma into something honest and beautiful worth sharing at the Mother Church, The Ryman, the soul of Nashville," she added.

Related to that trauma: the widely publicized decade-long legal dispute between her and her longtime producer, Dr. Luke, over allegations of sexual assault and battery among other accusations -- and a countersuit alleging defamation.

However, their case was officially settled on June 22, 2023, a month before its trial date. In an official statement, Kesha notes she was "looking forward to moving on with her life." Dr. Luke continued to deny Kesha's claims.

Those claims have yielded albums and songs over the past decade with titles including "Gag Order" and "High Road," plus "Rich, Straight, White Men" and "The Drama."

Much like her hair color in high school, Kesha is no shrinking violet.

Throwing herself wholly into the cyclical flow of mainstream popular music allowed Kesha something that erred in the direction of "solace" for the past decade.

The artist who launched her career at 17, suddenly found herself at age 33 three years ago, as the world stopped at the onset of COVID-19's quarantine. It was a jarring moment.

She said a realization set in that she lacked the personal life she felt she deserved and was becoming emotionally and socially stunted by her existence.

"I was leading this narcissistic, self-involved life for myself and my fans that crashed down around me," she said. "Realizing that people had to live without my content or craft was initially an uncomfortable experience. Reconnecting to my craft as art in this chapter of my life required me to channel the big emotions I used to put into songs into conversations with the universe about allowing creations larger than my humanity to exist."

For Kesha, the deconstruction of the relationship between the craft of songwriting and the art of creativity exists at the human core of her heavily publicized stresses of the past ten years.

For her, songwriting as a job became too overwrought to bear. However, because of the self-described "privilege" of how lucrative her job had been, it had the freedom to evolve into discovering a passion for art over commerce.

As a newfound artist working without explicit commercial aims, Kesha paired with producer Rick Rubin to explore how to write "emotive," "scary" and "vulnerably open" songs that emerge from her core, "gut" spirituality.

The album had both fully-produced and acoustic releases in May and June of 2023.

Tracks like "Eat the Acid" are synth-heavy productions with lyrics including "Been dodgin' gods I didn't want / I'd gotten used to bein' lost / I never felt like I belonged / Turns out my mama wasn't wrong."

Acoustically, the album's closer "Happy" resonates more poignantly:

"What if none of this happened? / It's nothing like I imagined it / What if I wasn't this strong? / What if it all just went different? / So many times I wish I woulda just listened / I wasn't ready for it all / There's so many things I'd change but I can't / There's so many things I said that I wish I left unsaid / Time's passing me by / Gotta just laugh so I don't cry."

The past decade has fundamentally altered how her neuropathways approach writing and performance, she said.

"Watching my insecurities disintegrate was a painful series of 'ego deaths' as I watched the world's preconceptions of me crumbling away," she said. "As I desperately wrote my way through it, I cried daily, for three weeks."

"At this point of my career, I'm physically incapable of going into the studio and lying to myself and others by making an incredibly disingenuous, happy pop album filled with fun, party anthems. Whether I liked it or not, the truth that appeared [on "Gag Order"] was not reflected in perfect love songs, either," she said. "The parts of myself that I had ignored for so long -- ugly, post-COVID-19 pandemic anxiety-ridden emotions -- were present."

When asked to summarize who she is as an artist now, she offers an answer that when it reaches an expletive, hits hardest.

"My songs have evolved from being guerrilla-trained to make pop hits ...to being intimate f***ing art that I pour my soul into that has no boundaries or rules."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Kesha on 'Gag Order,' ahead of her Nashville shows at The Ryman