Kesha feels “gratitude” and “happiness” over the reaction to her new single.
The 37-year-old singer left record label Kemosabe in December, six months after her long-running legal battle with producer Dr Luke came to an end and earlier this month, she unveiled ‘Joyride’, the first offering from her own Kesha Records, and she’s delighted people have responded so well to the track because it marks her finding her freedom.
Asked how she feels about the response to the single, she told Forbes magazine: “Like the most gratitude, happiness – I feel free for the first time since I was 18 years old and I so appreciate every single person that has streamed it, and I love the videos that are being made.
“I’ve spent almost 10 years in litigation and millions of dollars in legal fees. This joy has been hard-fought for me, so I love that people are ready to ‘Joyride’ with me.”
The ‘Praying’ hitmaker has always found writing helpful when it comes to working through her emotions and “processing life”.
She explained: “I started writing songs to deal with my emotions. I’m a highly sensitive person – I’m a triple Pisces, so these emotions come up very intensely and people can do a lot of things with them.
“If you feel rage, people can people go bash a window of a car, but for me, if I feel rage, I take it to the studio and I currently surround myself with incredibly safe people that help me take my emotion and we alchemise it into song.
“So, it’s become the way I process life and the beautiful part of writing music or making any art of any kind is that you get to process something in, hopefully, a safe way.”
And Kesha loves that what she created can then go on to help other people.
She added: “Once it has come out of your body and onto the page or into the microphone, if you choose to share it, that healing that you experience, then can possibly help to heal other people.
“The reason music relates globally is because we’re all just talking about our emotions and it humanises all of us. You see yourself in a song. You see an emotion that you have in a song – it’s relational, it’s connective – and it’s for me, very spiritual because I believe we’re all one and music is one of the most beautiful ways to feel that.
“We’re all connecting to the same human emotion because we really are all connected.”