Kesha finds new ground but keeps party going

May 30, 2013 at 12:05a.m.

Los Angeles Times

In the three years she’s spent as an A-list pop star, Kesha has done little to cultivate a reputation for timidity.

“Before I leave / Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack,” she famously bragged about an evening out in “Tik Tok,” the 2009 single that’s sold more than 6 million copies. “’Cause when I leave for the night / I ain’t coming back.”

Other instructively titled songs from her debut album “Animal” — a No. 1 hit on the Billboard 200 — include “Hungover,” “Take It Off” and “Party at a Rich Dude’s House,” each a vividly imagined (if oft-disparaged) exhortation to live it up set over throbbing electro-pop beats.

Leaning back in a low-slung chair, a floppy, black hat shading her eyes, Kesha recently said that her latest record, “Warrior,” — with its potent mix of rock signifiers and overt sexuality — is an attempt to expand the party-hearty persona she created with “Animal.”

“I’m trying to show the world who I am as a human being,” she explained. “I think I’ve realized that you don’t just have to be one thing — you can be sexy and cool and funny and down-to-earth.”

Still, Kesha, 25, acknowledged that her semi-legendary gumption had been tested while shooting a scene from the video for her latest single, “Die Young,” in which she writhes around on a bed wearing not much more than an animal pelt.

“I had on my bra and underwear,” she clarified at a North Hollywood rehearsal studio. “But I’m uncomfortable in my bra and underwear around one person, let alone however many million have seen the video.”

So why strip down? Kesha said she wanted to showcase “imperfect” beauty — “I’m not a size 0,” she pointed out — in “a world that’s been airbrushed to death.”

It’s the same approach the singer takes on “Warrior.”

Rawer and randier than “Animal” (or its 2010 follow-up EP, “Cannibal”), “Warrior” extends Kesha’s brand of post-millennial recklessness but incorporates sounds inspired by old-school rock acts such as Alice Cooper, Marc Bolan of T. Rex and Iggy Pop, who turns up for a duet in the hard-stomping “Dirty Love.”

Yet if the album repositions the singer to some degree, it does so without repudiating her established sensibility.

“A lot of people think ’pop’ is a dirty word, but I love living on pop radio — that’s where my heart is,” Kesha said. “I never set out to make a record that would be played on rock radio. I wanted to make a pop record that had [nerve].”