Kesha Rose Sebert was born in Los Angeles, California on 01 March 1987 to Rosemary Patricia "Pebe" Sebert, who is a singer-songwriter who co-wrote the 1978 single 'Old Flames Can't Hold A Candle To You', as featured on Dolly Parton's 1980 album 'Dolly, Dolly, Dolly'. Pebe, a single mother, struggled financially while supporting herself and her two children, sometimes having to look after them onstage while performing. In 1991 Pebe moved the family to Nashville, Tennessee after securing a new publishing deal for her songwriting, and she frequently brought her children along to recording studios and encouraged Kesha to sing when she noticed her vocal talent. Kesha attended Franklin High School and Brentwood High School, playing the trumpet and later the saxophone in the school marching band, and after attaining a near-perfect score on her SATs, she attended Barnard College, dropping out after three months to pursue her music career. In addition to taking songwriting classes, Kesha was also taught how to write songs by her mother, and they would often write together when she returned home from high school. Eventually she began recording demos, which her mother would give to people she knew in the music business. Around this time, Pebe answered an advertisement from the American reality TV series 'The Simple Life', looking for an "eccentric" family to host Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, and the episode featuring the Sebert family aired in 2005. Kesha's demos were gaining interest in the music business, and in 2005, at age 18, she was signed to Kemosabe Records, and later to David Sonenberg's management company, DAS Communications Inc. Working with several writers and producers while at Kemosabe she co-wrote Australian pop group The Veronicas' single 'This Love' with producer Toby Gad, while at the same time earning a living as a waitress, and it was around this time that she added the 'ironic' $ to her name. In 2008 she appeared in the video for her friend Katy Perry's single 'I Kissed A Girl', and also sang background vocals for the song 'Lace And Leather' by Britney Spears. A deal with Warner Bros. Records fell through due to her existing contract with Kemosabe, and after failing to negotiate deals with Lava Records and Atlantic in 2009, she finally signed a multi-album deal with RCA.
Having spent the previous 6 years working on material for her debut album, she chose the best of the 200 songs that she'd written in the preceding years, and the resulting 'Animal' sold two million copies and was certified Platinum in the United States. The lead single, 'Tik Tok', broke the record in the United States with 610,000 digital downloads sold in a single week, the highest ever by a female artist since digital download tracking began in 2003. Subsequent singles from the album - 'Blah Blah Blah', 'Your Love Is My Drug' and 'Take It Off' - achieved similar commercial success, each reaching the top ten in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Kesha's deliberately unpolished aesthetic and juvenile stage persona quickly made her a deeply polarizing figure, with some of her critics finding her output to be unsophisticated, while others felt that she was manufactured and lacked credibility. In November 2010, 'Animal' was re-released with a companion EP 'Cannibal'. The lead single taken from Cannibal, 'We R Who We R', debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States, and with two number ones and four top ten hits Kesha was named Hot 100 Artist of 2010 by Billboard magazine, with 'Tik Tok' ranked as the best-performing song of the year in the US. With a backlog of 200 songs, it's not surprising that they started to leak onto the internet after the huge success of her first few releases, and so here is just a small selection of the ones that didn't make 'Animal'/'Cannibal'.
Track listing
01 TV To Talk About
02 Who Do You Love?
03 This Is Me Breaking Up With You
04 True Love (feat. Katy Perry)
05 Booty Call
06 Butterscotch
07 Boy Like You (feat. Ashley Tisdale)
09 Mouth
09 Red Lipstick
10 Lovers In the Deep End
11 Paper Airplane
12 Bad Dream
13 Heart Fall Out
14 Boys Just Suck
15 Shots On the Hood Of My Car
16 Lost Weekend
17 Run Devil Run
