What’s Driving Kesha’s Under-the-Radar Comeback?

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A mini-tour of college spring-break parties. A club gig at a 700-capacity venue in D.C. A gay pride festival. One-off appearances at benefit shows and tributes. Sitting in with Guster.

Is this any way for one of the biggest pop stars of the 21st century to mount a comeback?

Maybe, if you’re Kesha, and you’re feeling cautious after a seemingly rough year.

You might have figured that the singer would want to make the biggest splash possible to declare that she’s ready for action after her highly publicized troubles in 2014, which included rehab for an eating disorder and allegations of sexual harassment and abusive Svengalism in lawsuits and countersuits involving her former mentor, Dr. Luke. But rather than either going for the brass ring again or keeping herself off the market completely — the only two options most superstars consider open to them — Kesha is taking a curious middle road, booking modest dates that appear designed to draw the least amount of scrutiny possible.

But, of course, trying to avoid scrutiny invites scrutiny… at least if you’re lucky enough to still be at the level where people notice when you’re deliberately underplaying your career. A story in The Atlantic plumbed “The Mystery of Kesha’s Comeback,” asking, “Where does a pop narrative go after such an ugly turn?” The answer is: Not usually the Black Cat in D.C., where Kesha played a pop-up gig for $25 a ticket last week. You could argue that it’s just like a superstar to play a club gig to attract attention, but that doesn’t explain the rest of her itinerary, which is favoring college dates, including a free show at Tufts University this Saturday.

Mind you, it’s only been just over a year and a half since Kesha was last seen playing amphitheaters in North America. Did her perceived draw really disappear along with the dollar sign in her name, or is she actually playing it smart, in a canny fashion we don’t usually expect from our maturing overnight sensations?

She and her camp aren’t talking, presumably because they don’t want to have to address the issues surrounding the Dr. Luke lawsuits as litigation progresses… or maybe, you could also surmise, because 2015 really has been set aside as an exploratory, work-in-progress year for Kesha, as she attempts to become less of a manipulable Eliza Doolittle and more a Madonna.

There’s no third album in sight, with Kesha having stated earlier this year that she was still writing for the follow-up to 2010’s Animal — one of the most sublimely silly and enjoyable albums of this young century — and 2012’s disappointing sophomore effort, Warrior. Booking a summer amphitheater tour with no new product would have been a losing prospect, but foregoing road money altogether isn’t a wise option, either, when almost any artist of a certain stature has “debts no honest man can pay,” in the words of Bruce Springsteen.

So it makes sense — finance-wise, if not necessarily image-wise — for Kesha to book some of those spring-break dates while she figures out where to go artistically. The talent budget for her Spring Fling show at Penn University was reported by the student paper as being $180,000, and you can guess the opening act, EDM dude Kygo, didn’t account for that much of that. Not a bad payday for someone who sings mostly to tracks — although there are a couple of male dancers onstage at almost all times —  and whose major set extravagance is confetti cannons. The danger is whether next year’s amphitheater bookers look at this year’s shows and think they represent her new normal… although that’s probably nothing a No. 1 smash in early 2016 couldn’t cure.

The key, we can only guess, is in buying Kesha some time for her to find herself while staying in flight under the radar.

“I’ve been working on music for months now, obsessing in the studio all night,” she told Yahoo Style back in January. “I have a lot of new music, but it’s so all over the place. Some of it’s weird country, about… can I curse? Well, it’s about stuff. Then I have love songs. So it’s all over the place and I’m still kind of compiling my record.”

She’s compiling it without the extremely estranged mastermind behind her previous hits, which can be a tough road to hoe. Just ask Shania Twain, who waited an eternity to reenter the music scene after splitting with her husband/producer, then had radio programmers missing the magic as much as she didn’t miss Mutt.

But just as critical in this era is rethinking the image. As one commenter on the Atlantic’s website asked: “Does she still look like she needs a round of antibiotics and to be washed down with a garden hose?”

The answer to that is a definitive no, although what will replace her gnarlier 2010-12 look appears to be in flux. Onstage, she still wears a lot of facepaint, but more ornamentally, and less the raccoon-on-the-walk-of-shame look. Offstage, she’s going for a refreshingly almost makeup-free look, appearing downright wholesome at times, as if she were actually brushing with Crest instead of Jack.

“I was dressing in garbage bags on the MTV red carpet, and it was really like DIY,” she told Yahoo Style in January. “I was duct-taping my boobs together and wearing vintage T-shirts and panties onstage. Now that I’m at Fashion Week, I can’t do that anymore — or I can, but just secretly. I don’t know, I’m just kind of exploring fashion as an art form, which I never have before… I’m dipping my toe in fashion and acting.”

In other words, Versace’s gain may be Hefty Bags’ loss.

For now, Kesha fans are online and following the trail of college gigs and one-off shows. “Touring gives me life,” she Instagrammed after a recent show. On one recent night, she sat in with HAIM at L.A.’s Troubadour and then drove over to the Wiltern to appear with her favorite childhood rock band, Guster. In another April guest spot, she sang “California Girls” at a Brian Wilson tribute.

In her own shows, she’s still doing the songs from her Dr. Luke-helmed albums, even closing her shows with “Die Young,” the song she claimed she was forced to sing. The only unusual choice in most of the gigs is “Timber,” a duet she did on Pitbull’s 2012 album Global Warming, although at her D.C. club show, she performed an acoustic medley of Nick Jonas’s “Jealous,” Chris Brown’s “Those Hoes Ain’t Loyal,” and Big Sean’s “I Don’t F--- With You.”

The reviews have been good — not that there have been many from professional critics, since she’s successfully avoided the mainstream media with these shows, but from fans, anyway. On her social media this week, she reprinted a run-on, all-caps critique from a follower named haus.of.dylan: “GUYS OMG I WAS SO CLOSE TO HER I HAVE BEER ALL OVER GLITTER ON MY BODY I CAUGHT SOME DOLLARS THAT SHE SIGNED THEY SAY BONER ON THEM AND $ AND SHE DREW A PENIS AND THERE WERE DRAG QUEENS AND WHIP CREAM SEX BEER SHOWERS AND OMG IM BURPING! THEY HAD CANNONS OF GLITTER AND SHE HAD SEXUAL INTERACTIONS ON STAGE AND OMG”

Weekend Update’s Jebidiah Atkinson could hardly have said it better, right?

Perhaps her new, fledgling independence is best seen in the notes taken by an observer at Penn University’s student paper, who noted that after closing out her show there with “Die Young,” Kesha “drives her own golf cart back to her dressing room.” With Kesha truly at the wheel, a forestalled comeback could yet get interesting.