A deliberate contrast to 2017’s catharsis-intended Rainbow, Kesha’s latest, High Road, comes practically on the heels of the ten-year anniversary of Animal’s release. The very (debut) album that established her party girl, “hot mess” roots, and, with it, a devoted fan base of “animals” that seemed to commiserate with living a life less glamorous (one that Britney, Paris and Lindsay made chic with much more money at their disposal in the 00s). With High Road’s opening track, “Tonight,” Kesha is up to her old tricks as she touts living for the night, putting out the vibe, “Tonight’s the best night of our lives.” Whether that means at the cost of some embarrassing behavior and/or loss of one’s phone, wallet and dignity doesn’t infer it wasn’t worth the sacrifice to the proverbial gods of the darkness called Nighttime. Thus Kesha gives the thesis statement for the entire album (and her entire career) with, “We’re staying out tonight/There’s no turning back,” which harkens back to the “Tik Tok” lyric, “When I leave in the morning I ain’t comin’ back.”
And yet, just because listeners might think they’ve gotten Kesha to “dance for them” (as Tones and I would put it, “Just like a monkey, I’ve been dancin’ my whole life”), she wants to clarify that she is very much doing “My Own Dance,” just as the single declares. Which is precisely why she’ll roll up to the grocery store in pajamas looking for a new fix of her “magic cereal”–the kind that seems to give her another fix of liquid-y glitter when drenched in cereal. Just the sort of fortification she needs for “Raising Hell”–with a little help from Big Freedia, obviously. Filled with raucous beats courtesy of STINT and Omega, Kesha gets in touch with her “good Christian bitch” side intermingled with just a touch of sinful, Satan-adhering behavior (as addressed in the video, during which she accidentally kills her abusive husband… not a good look for a beloved televangelist). After all, who wants to go to heaven without raising a little bit of hell? Which Kesha has certainly done in her lifetime.
Even so, it’s clear she still wrestles with the hardest thing the Zohar asks you to do: forgive those who have done you wrong. And even if that was the message she espoused on “Praying”–a direct aim at Dr. Luke–it doesn’t mean Kesha is opposed to still talking shit about her “opponents” and detractors, commenting of the song, “I think after I put up ‘Praying,’ people would expect me to be very pious and take the high road. And it’s quite the opposite: It’s about talking about how things have bothered me in the past about people talking shit or just being up my ass. And especially in a culture where everyone is so ready to just cancel you if you say one wrong thing. It’s just about me being like, ‘Do you know what? I’m just going to get high and I’m going to laugh about this because it’s so ridiculous.’” Ergo the empowered lyric, “I’m taking the high road, I’m high as fuck/And these assholes won’t shut up/Got me laughing, I ain’t losing no sleep.” Not that Kesha has ever really been much of one for sleep anyway.
On the slowed down “Shadow” (not to be confused with the Britney Spears or Ashlee Simpson song of the same name), Kesha goes back to this theme of a live and let live philosophy as presented on “Praying” and “High Road,” a mid-tempo beat that finds her asserting, “I’ma love you even though you hate me”–the thing that even the most devout of so-called Christians seem to struggle with. And something that can be particularly challenging when one works in the entertainment industry, so rife with conjuring trolls out of the darkness of the abyssal internet to deliver their acerbic two cents. To these people and anyone else like them, Kesha says, “Go get your shadow out of my sunshine/Out of my blue skies, out of my good times/So get your darkness out of my damn way.” Because even if you don’t, Kesha will shit out a rainbow at you. Sweet and mellifluous “Honey” that she is–which also happens to be a track Kesha co-wrote with, of all people, Tayla Parx (best known for being the Ariana Grande hitmaker who helped spawn “thank u, next), who sings a large portion of the uncredited backing vocals in the song.
Considering her influence on the track, it’s no surprise that there’s a certain TLC meets Salt n’ Pepa flavor to the sound, as well as a subject matter that addresses that all too common problem of a Single White Female-like friend feeling inclined to seduce her “bestie’s” man for the sake of “getting closer” to the friend in question. Like Madonna with “She’s Not Me,” Kesha speaks of a backstabbing, “she was like weirdly obsessed with me” type of woman who needs to be told, “You can have my sloppy seconds if you really need (take it)/Find my pictures under ‘legends’ if you Google me (yup)/And he’s only sleeping with you, trying to get to me (that’s so funny, right?)/It’s so easy, you’re dead to me.” So much for the mantra about choosing to love the ones you hate and/or who have done you dirty. But even the highly evolved (conflicted as they are about said “evolution”) Kabbalist ilk get the blues. Sometimes the “Cowboy Blues,” as it were. A Sliding Doors-inspired ditty that ponders on a moment in time lost as a result of waffling or insecurity, an incident that tends to occur most commonly at the bar or club where you were almost certain you might have met the potential “one” (of course, that doesn’t ever really happen, though we all so badly want to believe it does). Still musing on the brief encounter three years later, Kesha asks herself (and her three cats), “Did I fuck my whole life up? Did I miss my one true love?/Was he right in front of me at the dive bar?/Was that you with the cowboy blues?/You ask me, ‘Babe, take a chance, come on, just stay’/Why’d I leave you standing there at the dive bar? I miss you with the cowboy blue suit.” Alas, Kesha should probably be reminded: “Bitch, he ain’t thinkin’ boutchu.”
Yet, on “Resentment,” Kesha persists in thinking a little bit too much with another track that conjures the image of her being in a room alone suffering in the agony of her thoughts and regrets (as she is in the video for the single). Her country twang reaches a crescendo with the chorus (lent some added harmony with the accompaniment of Sturgill Simpson, among others), “I don’t hate you, babe, it’s worse than that/’Cause you hurt me and I don’t react/I’ve been building up this thing for months/Oh, resentment.” It’s a resentment that continues on “A Little Bit of Love,” albeit with Kesha returning to her party-tinged flair (thanks to another beat from STINT) as she sing-yells, “You only wanna kiss me when I give you sad eyes/You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone ’til the afterlife/I could use a little bit of love tonight/I could use a little bit of love tonight.” For yes, the craving of affection is just as omnipresent on High Road as it is on another January-released album, RARE.
With a similar interpolation to “Blah Blah Blah,” “Birthday Suit” (which was originally leaked in its demo form in 2017) has video game-inspired (think Super Mario, what else?) beats in spades as Kesha speaks to that tinge with the lyric, “I kinda wanna play/You got a game, boy, boy, wanna race me?” Although she doesn’t seem super interested in the dude’s personality (just as the case was in “Blah Blah Blah”), she does sound down to make use of his naked body. And, just as Spice Girls have a song called “Naked,” it appears as though Kesha wants to make a more overt allusion to the 90s pop goddesses with “Kinky,” a track she chooses to feature her “past self” on: Ke$ha. After all, it’s one that’s filled with the raunchy, tongue-in-cheek flair one expects of early era Ke$ha, before she dropped the dollar sign around the time of Rainbow.
As such, a playful intro that includes vocal cameos from Kesha’s mom, Pebe Sebert, and co-songwriter, Wrabel, lead into Kesha announcing, “This is Kinky Spice,” with Wrabel interjecting, “I’m a sloppy, I’m a/I’m quite the Sloppy Spice if you ask me.” Touting a polyamorous lifestyle (she is, let us not forget, a Pisces, like fellow kink freak Rihanna), Kesha shruggingly chimes, “Tell me the freakiest shit/You secretly wanna do/Baby don’t be embarrassed/Probably wanna do that shit too/Monogamy ain’t natural/At least not for me and you/We’re in our own dimension/We’re making up our own rules.” That is to say, there are none when one lets their kink flag fly. Just as Kesha sonically does on “The Potato Song (Cuz I Want To).” As something of a funhouse-friendly sequel to “Rich, White, Straight, Men,” the carnival rhythm matches her best warbling impression of John Lennon on “Instant Karma.” And, to that “zen” effect, Kesha goes on about a desire to declutter her life of all things material, instead choosing to chuck such frivolities in favor of the simple solution: “go grow some potatoes/And flowers/Then go eat some cake, if you want to!” (how Kate Spade of her). With a kazoo denouement, it’s arguably the most experimental cut on the record, leading into the serene, hippie-dippy “BFF” featuring Wrabel (who somehow got a mention when Tayla Parx didn’t for “Honey”). Beautifully harmonizing about the subject of best friends who can make you feel like yourself again when everyone else seems to make you feel wrong, Kesha and Wrabel croon, “You build me up when I’m feeling low, low, low/Since we met, I don’t feel a-lo-lo-lone.” Of course, this song isn’t exactly much of a comfort to those misanthropes who have never been very good at striking up an acquaintanceship, let alone a best friendship.
Still, what Kesha has in friend-making abilities she lacks in a patriarchal figure, as intimately addressed on “Father Daughter Dance.” Like a more developed version of Lindsay Lohan’s “Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father),” Kesha laments, “Oh, I wish my heart wasn’t broken from the start/I never stood a fightin’ chance/In all my days, from my cradle to my grave/I’ll never have a father-daughter dance.” A.k.a. Papa was a rollin’ stone who was never around. The scar of such an early trauma causes her to question if she herself should even bother taking a gamble on having kids, lest she “fuck ‘em up” the way her dad did to her. Yet, in true Kesha fashion, all she can try to do is see the silver lining by concluding, “But all of this has made me who I am without that father-daughter dance.” Ah, the pitfalls of a girl imbued with Daddy issues (though, on the flipside, there still might be nothing worse than a boy with Daddy issues–this also includes being a Daddy’s boy, a phrase and phenomenon only Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has ever seen fit to acknowledge, even if in a more than slightly allusive to being gay way).
Reverting once more to those Tennessee roots on “Chasing Thunder,” Kesha talks about bein’ a ramblin’ man (on the High Road, naturally) and an unavoidable tendency to always chase after thunder (it’s not unlike chasing pavements). For she’s not “a rose” but “a wildflower,” adding, that she’s “got that gypsy blood” for good Madonna on “I Don’t Search I Find” measure. As such a person, it’s no wonder Kesha has seized an opportunity to embrace the tour life in promotion of the album. One that will take her straight to the “Summer,” a bonus track, of sorts, that Kesha tacked on at the last minute after completing production on it with Ryan Lewis. Encapsulating the nostalgia of a romantic summer night (something Lana Del Rey would surely approve of), Kesha muses, “Time just blows, how about we rewind slow-mo?/I could really use one of those nights ’til the sunrise/On that high life, when nobody could bring us down/I’m so alive, jumping fences, and cutting lines/I really meant it then, that one moment.” A moment (just as so many of us have) that Kesha would give anything to get back.
At the same time, nostalgia can be nothing more than a “Big Bad Wolf”–the final song on the album for those with the Japanese bonus track version–especially when Kesha’s memory seems to be jogged about how many other boys (though certainly not men) there are for the taking. Even if they would like to be the ones to believe they’re preying on you, as described by Kesha with the lines, “Pull me close he said/I’m gonna get you/And I regret sayin’ I’m gonna let you/Didn’t know he was the big bad wolf, he was the big bad wolf.” Like her own inverse take on Shakira’s “She Wolf,” the infectious beats tell a tale all their own, pulsating with anxiousness that connotes an undeniable carnality (further heightened by more biblical references in the form of: “Shame on you, killed a sheep in its manger”). So for those wondering if Kesha had lost sight of her inner Animal, fear not. High Road is version 2.0.
