Kesha In Control

- Jessica Herndon

It’s dusk in Los Angeles, and Kesha is swinging her long, layered hair back and forth to the beat of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” “Yesss!” calls out Cosmo’s on-set photographer Jason Kim, as Kesha pauses to stare directly into his camera, doing her best to hold a sexy pout without blinking. The 31-year-old musical phenom lasts about 10 seconds, then bursts out laughing.

In the moment, relaxed and smiling, she oozes realness—and a vulnerability that feels at odds with the Kesha who rocketed to fame in 2009 with a DGAF ’tude and even more DGAF lyrics (see “Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack” and “Ain’t got a care in the world, but got plenty of beer” from her hit single “Tik Tok”). “I thought I had to be very tough and really strong and portray that I didn’t give a fuck, and that just was not the case,” she says now. “I was pretending like everything was great all the time.”

The truth is that acting like the bold party girl from her songs took a toll—especially since, in private, she was often racked with insecurities. After nearly five years and two successful albums, “I was nervous about everything, and it was so exhausting,” she remembers. “The final straw was when I was with my mom at a family dinner party and I was so anxious. Driving home, I had to pull over, and I was like, I can’t keep this secret anymore.” That secret included a serious eating disorder, for which Kesha checked herself into a treatment facility in 2014.