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Kesha Will Not Squander Her Second Act: ‘I Waited for This Moment My Entire Goddamn Life’

Kesha's new album 'Period' is a "homecoming" the pop star. She discusses the making of the album, and how happiness is the best revenge.

After becoming the brightest new star in pop at the beginning of the 2010s thanks to turbo-charged, party-hard smash hits like “TiK ToK,” “We R Who We R” and the Pitbull collaboration “Timber.” Kesha became entrenched in a series of lawsuits with the primary producer on those songs, Lukasz “Dr. When “Timber” was the biggest song in the world, I made a choice — and I stopped being the thing that I never intended on being, which was a woman who’s onstage preaching about self-love, who behind-the-scenes is not feeding herself, trying to please everyone except for herself, spiraling about this internalized shame that has been projected onto her by a bunch of external forces. To that point, you sound relaxed throughout the whole album, and comfortable in the moments that contain a greater sense of gravity — like the opener “Freedom,” which is your longest song to date at nearly six and a half minutes, and the closer “Cathedral,” on which you sing, “I’m the savior, I’m the altar, I’m the Holy Ghost,” and you let your voice vibrate on that line in such an interesting way.

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