Ke$ha (with a dollar sign) likes beards. Her real name, Kesha Rose Sebert, doesn’t have a dollar sign. Stuff like that looks trashy on a newborn baby’s birth certificate. Hers would have been signed on 1st March, 1987, in Los Angeles, California.
She was raised solely by her mother Pebe Sebert, who was a singer-songwriter herself back in the day. Times were often tough as Pebe had to support both Ke$ha and her older brother Lagan. Following a new publishing deal for Pebe, the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1991. Ke$ha stuck out a bit from her new, religiously conservative school in Nashville. She would wear homemade “purple velvet pants” and dyed her hair purple to match. Ke$ha maintains a similar extravagant style today. If it ain’t broke…
The Seberts were quite a musical family. Lagan played in a punk band and Pebe would write songs with Ke$ha after school. At 17, Ke$ha dropped out of school to pursue a recording career in Los Angeles. There, Dr. Luke signed her in 2005 to his label Kemosabe Entertainment. She got caught in limbo for a while, working as a waitress while furthering her career in the studio.
Her break came in early 2009 when she appeared on Flo Rida’s number one single, “Right Round”. It was a bit of a fluke. One day, Ke$ha had walked into a recording session with Flo Rida and Dr. Luke. They needed a female vocalist for the chorus and it was set.
Soon after,
Ke$ha signed a multi-album deal with RCA Records. She had been working on her
debut album for six years by this point and had amassed just over 200 songs.
She whittled them down to just fourteen, and it became her debut album, Animal,
released in January 2010. The album’s first single, “Tik Tok”, topped the
charts in eleven countries. The magazine Rolling Stone described the album as
“repulsive, obnoxious and ridiculously catchy”.
