Kesha found a new confidence in her voice after hitting the high notes on a recent tour with her band The Creepies.
The Tik Tok hitmaker feared she lacked the vocal skills to express the emotions she was feeling inside as she started work on her comeback album Rainbow, after a frustrating legal battle with her former mentor and producer Dr. Luke, so she hit the road for a stripped-down tour.
"We did away with many of the big pop gimmicks: no dancers, no screens, no backing vocalists, no backing tracks - it was just my band and I letting it all out onstage," she writes in a new essay. "Even though I didn't have new music out in the world I was sick of waiting around, and I had a lot of raw crazy energy and wanted to reconnect with my fans. It was a sink-or-swim situation - it was either me sing my a** off or sound like s**t, because it was just me singing..."
"I had to rise to the occasion and take control of my voice and in the process I gained a lot of confidence in my vocal ability I've never had before...," she adds.
Her newfound confidence also inspired her female empowerment song Woman, which she wrote after coming to a major turning point in her life.
"I was really feeling that conviction one particular day while I was stuck in traffic on my way to the studio and out of nowhere I felt the urge to scream, 'I'm a motherf**king woman'," she adds. "By the time I got the the studio, I was chanting, 'I'm a motherf**king woman'.
"The two men I was writing with that day didn't quite know what to do with me... That day in particular I felt like I had earned the right call myself a motherf**king woman. I have always been a feminist, but for much of my life I felt like a little girl trying to figure things out. In the past few years, I have felt like a woman more than ever. I just feel the strength and awesomeness and power of being female..."
Rainbow is the long-awaited follow-up to Kesha's 2012 album Warrior. It is due out next month (Aug17).
