"Later, she told me that people didn’t really understand the predicament she was in. They think it’s simple, that she’s free or not free, that she must have won her court case because she’s performing. “They were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’re free,’ and I was like, ‘No, sweetheart, I love you, but no, I am not, and I don’t know where you got that information.’ ” Her Animals, the world at large, they didn’t really get that she had written new songs — 22 of them — and recorded them at her own expense and that they were sitting somewhere waiting to be completed and polished and released. She told me that she wanted to get her story out so people really understood what was going on — that right now, she is the opposite of free...
On the rooftop of her hotel in Brooklyn the day after the show, Kesha was talking about the particular and peculiar predicament she finds herself in — a pop star suspended in a Jell-O mold of paralysis, unable to put out new music until all of this is resolved — when a bee began to circle her with intense interest and finally landed on the knee of her black jeans, within one of their artfully torn holes. “If I don’t freak out, I’ll be fine,” she said, her eyes watching the insect...
Consider that until she can release music, Kesha has very limited means of income, with litigation that has gone on since 2014 and that costs at least $100,000 per month, the most conservative estimate I could calculate. Consider that Kesha has no ability to earn money, outside of touring for audiences of a few hundred, paying expenses from her own pocket, and that, as Kesha’s side has suggested, not allowing her to release music is a good way to prevent her from being able to afford continued litigation. But the least rewarding thing you can do is try to guess at any of this. You can read every one of the thousands of pages of filings and come no closer to the truth. Trust me, I tried. “Reading court filings doesn’t get you to the truth,” Dan Stone, an entertainment litigator at Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger, told me. “Even if this case goes to trial, it’s possible that no one will ever know what did or did not happen when the parties were alone in a room.”...
She imagined “Rainbow” like a great orchestral production, something that Brian Wilson would have done on “Pet Sounds.” She wanted this song to be produced by Ben Folds, who just happened to have friends who could play cellos and violas and kettle drums and the oboe and the flute and the French horn. He called in all his favors, and they rented out the big room at Capitol Records and tried to do the song fast and cheap. He wanted her to stand where Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra had stood, to understand her importance in the line of musicians that people remember.
He had her play with the bridge a little, sending ideas into his voice mail over a couple of days until they got it exactly right for recording. The process was revelatory for her. “He just really helped pull out of me exactly what I wanted to be, but I’ve always kind of been scared to try,” she recalls. “And he’s like: ‘Try to sing that high C. Try to go higher. Try to do this weird thing with your voice.’ Instead of getting shamed, it was like I was being encouraged and validated, and it was so magical and so beautiful.” Folds produced the final version using just two takes."
Everyone deserves to discover that it can be so much better than whatever they are tolerating.
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