It’s often said that “everything happens for a reason.” This usually as a means to console oneself over something not achieved, not received. But in Pebe Sebert’s (a.k.a. Kesha’s mom) case, everything really did seem to happen for a reason with regard to what, up until now, was her “lost album.” The lone record Sebert ever made as a solo artist (instead usually writing songs for others—which she started doing as a more effective way to pay the bills) was in 1984, when she joined forces with Guy Roche, now perhaps best known for his work with Diane Warren (in addition to being among the few that Warren was willing to count among her lovers), who Kesha also has mad love for, as her recent collaboration with Warren on “Dear Me” emphasized. And though the album had the potential to launch Sebert to the same heights as a Kate Bush-meets-Siouxsie Sioux type, she ended up getting in her own way as a result of giving in to her drug addictions (maybe brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack far more than Kesha ever did).
For this reason, along with how much more difficult and gatekeeping it once was to release music, Sebert’s self-titled album mostly spent the last forty years gathering dust when she wasn’t occasionally playing the music for close friends or family members. Kesha included. Indeed, without even asking her daughter to release it when she found out that Kesha would be starting her own independent label (called, what else, Kesha Records), it was the Real Queen of Tik Tok who told her mother it was the first album she wanted to put out on the imprint. As Sebert told Rolling Stone, “…she, without me asking her, said she wanted my record to be her first release, which was so lovely and beautiful.” And entirely poetic/full-circle. In other words, in this particular scenario, everything really did happen for a reason. With Sebert further suggesting, “I truly believe in my heart, if I had gotten famous, I would have died. I was enough of a mess not having the money to do the drugs the way I wanted to, that if I’d had unending amounts of money, I’m pretty sure I would not have survived.” Which, of course, would have been a loss on many levels, not least of which is the idea that Kesha might never have been born.
But three years prior to her second child’s (a.k.a. Kesha) birth, Sebert was still on a coming-of-age journey that shines through from the start of the record, which kicks off with “1945” (eleven years before Sebert’s birth year). For, although this song has the wistful, nostalgic conceit of setting its stage the same year WWII ended, the fact remains that it’s ultimately about a love that feels so magical and magnetic that it’s out of step with the rest of time, and certainly the present day (which, even in 1984, was jaded as fuck about romance). Perhaps that’s why it starts with the longing, “Old Hollywood” movie dialogue, “I want you to promise me something.” “What is it?” “Promise me that you’ll meet me again.” “Alright, I promise.” And with that, Sebert and her kooky-sounding music join forces, with Sebert establishing in the opening verse, “In a pub on Holloway/It was just another night/In a corner, looking far away/You were from another time.” While the use of the word “pub” might mislead the listener into thinking of some dreary town in England, it’s more likely that Sebert still had L.A. in mind, as “Holloway” likely refers to Holloway Drive in West Hollywood. Though, by 1991, Sebert had moved to Nashville, leaving L.A. behind until Kesha herself dropped out of high school to return there when she was seventeen to pursue her pop (/rock) star dreams.
As for the sound of “1945,” perhaps the easiest way to draw a through line between the music Sebert was making and the style that Kesha would come to be known for is that it sounds so willfully weird and zany compared to what might usually climb up the pop charts. Not to mention what an unusual way it is to talk about a love story, here framed against the concept of Sebert feeling as though she’s been transported back “forty years” because of how this man (described by her name-checked friend, “Punky” [Punky Brewster did, incidentally, start airing in ‘84] as “weird”) makes her feel. Which is, apparently, like a woman who must have a lot of pent-up romantic energy after her “beau” has been away at war and now returned (as Sebert described it, “It’s all very Twilight Zone. I’ve always been fascinated with the old Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock, so a lot of it has that vibe where something odd is going to happen”). What’s more, the full-circle nature of the album also applies to her referencing forty years ago in 1984 and it’s now another forty years later that Pebe Sebert gets its rightful release.
On the following track, “Hard Times Ahead,” the unusual musical stylings (even by 1980s standards) continue as Sebert’s sense of romance quickly dissipates after finding herself totally heartbroken by the person she thought would love her forever. Indeed, the song was very much influenced by the dissolution of her marriage to country singer Hugh Moffatt (with whom she co-wrote the song “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle To You”) in 1984, right as she was recording this album. So it is that the sincerity in her voice is palpable when she sings, “It happened so quickly, I guess I knew/Phone calls and letters weren’t gonna do/Your love was unending, I believed you/Physical needs have changed the truth/You’ve found another, she’s there in our bed/You’ve got a lover and I’ve got exactly what I said I wanted/Alone’s what I said/There’s gonna be some hard times ahead.”
Acknowledging what was still novel at the time for a woman to do, Sebert also speaks to her own ambition as being part of the reason for the breakup. Because, despite certain 80s movies tropes of women being able to “have it all,” it’s no secret to this day that a woman usually has to choose between a successful career or being wholly devoted to her romantic and family life. Which Sebert learned herself as the 80s continued—yet another reason the phrase “hard times ahead” was so apropos for her at that moment in time.
Perhaps internalizing the perception of herself as what society likes to call a “ball buster,” Sebert goes on to bill herself as someone whose love was “not a warm one, it’s much more like ice/I’m sure you felt cold with mе by your side.” So yes, she clearly took on a lot of the blame for what happened in her relationship, though maybe far more than she should have. To boot, the loss hit her even harder because it seemed she had placed all her eggs in the basket of love in terms of assuming it would be some kind of panacea. As she also told Rolling Stone, “When I first started being in love, I thought it was all magical. I thought it was all going to fix me—you know, the big thing is the right guy was going to fix me for sure and take care of all my problems. Boy, was I barking up the wrong tree. I had so much to learn.” Many of those still germinal lessons are explored on the album, including “City’s Burning,” a song written from the perspective of an actress at a party as she’s watching horrifying images on the TV screens around her amid the revelry. Yes, it smacks of something out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. And it’s also something of Sebert’s version of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Cities in Dust.” For while Sebert might not be talking about Pompeii, the “Cities in Dust”-related imagery is similar, at one point remarking of the images on TV, “There were bloody children covering the ground/But no one cares, no one sees.”
The disjointed feeling she gets from being among this merrymaking as such human suffering is displayed in the background is conveyed as much by the tone of the music (which, too, has its parallels to “Cities in Dust”) as it is her words, repeating to different women at different moments, “This ain’t no place for a kid to be.” Least of all her own. And at the time, Sebert’s then only child, Lagan, seems like the obvious “son” she’s referring to when, at around the two-minute-twenty-six-second mark, she goes into “talking mode” with the lyrics, delivering the verse to the bridge that goes, “And to my son, I leave this world/A bomb of heat, this killing place/It’s all I have to give to you/Put out the fire, search for the truth.”
The eerie resonance of those lines hits even harder today, as the environment continues to be worse off every year thanks to not only the continued collective addiction to the trappings of capitalism, but to the inherited damage that the present generations’ forebears set up thanks to the “convenience” of industrialization. So when Sebert urges the next generation to “put out the fire” and “search for the truth” (something other than Capitalism), it’s as relevant as ever. Almost like she had a “Premonition” of how it was all still going to be in the future. As for that being the title of the song that follows, well, this 80s-centric number is all about the sense of foreboding that can come when something bad already happens. In this instance, the death of a friend’s father, which Sebert mentions in the first verse as follows, “Daniel sat by his window/The whole house went dark/He looked out way up in the sky/And saw a falling star/Then the lights all came back on/He felt full of pain/His Daddy died that morning/In the New York City rain.” Naturally, the falling star and the lights going dark were a premonition too, but after this event, it seems as if Sebert can’t help but get the feeling there’s some other horror on the horizon as well, seeing ominous signs in such “events” as a picture falling and breaking (you know, back when pictures were actually tangible and in frames). And then, right after, she speaks of how her love was gone by the next day. So obviously, the picture falling was a kind of “premonition” of something bad to come.
It’s a song like this that makes one aware of the specific year and place this album was being made, with Richard Ramirez wreaking havoc and paranoia on the city of Los Angeles throughout 1984 (and well into 1985), perhaps a subliminal influence on the unsettled and anxious tone of this song. One that gives way to the gentler tone of “Why?,” a ballad that finds Sebert at her most emotionally vulnerable (and perhaps at her most “Diane Warren-esque,” lyrically speaking). So it is that she immediately begins, “Why do I feel this way?/Why?/When I know it’s not safe/To call you, let myself fall for you/And think there’s any hope.”
At twenty-eight years old while recording these songs, Sebert felt that her heart wasn’t “young anymore,” adding, “Still, it seems you just might be/The one I’ve waited for.” And so, evidently not learning from her previous mistakes and heartbreaks, Sebert decides to take another gamble on her emotions, confessing during the chorus, “Ooh/I’m so afraid I’ll lose, mm/But I can’t pass you by, keep on asking why/When it feels so true/For the first time, I’m in love.” Something about it bears the aura of a song that ought to have been on the Love Story Soundtrack or The Way We Were Soundtrack, or some other such cornball romantic movie.
But then, as though to offset “the cheese,” “Nice Girl” is a complete pendulum swing away from “Why?,” all feral and “fuck off.” In point of fact, it has the sort of sound that would have been right at home in an erotic thriller of the day. And it also has the type of lyrics to it that Madonna might have come up with in her pre-fame days, with Sebert echoing the “fighting for my life” tone of twenty-something M as she boasts and warns, “I learned to fight to stay alive in this city/Do you really want someone like me?/I’m not the right girl/If you want a nice girl/I know how to live in this world, it’s not a nice world/I’m not a nice girl.” As time went on, however, it became obvious that such a declaration wasn’t really true. After all, if she hadn’t been a nice girl, she might have just abandoned her kids to keep pursuing the dream of being a famous solo musician.
During other parts of the song, a Pat Benatar (who pre-fame Madonna was also being modeled after) vibe shines through, especially when she talks about being “in the battlefield” (yes, “Love Is a Battlefield” comes to mind) that is “big city” existence. So it is that during the cautioning bridge, Sebert pronounces, “My eyes are only frozen tears/My heart is made of steel/People try to bend a girl until her backbone breaks/Nice girls, they don’t last too long.”
Sebert’s hardened heart motif persists on “The Ice,” a seamless follow-up to “Nice Girl” as she shruggingly sings to what the 80s considered “hard rock” guitar riffs, “I guess that fire just couldn’t melt through the ice/Through the ice, all our hearts have revolved and burned/Through the ice, ‘cause we both thought we should have learned/From our own mistakеs/So we couldn’t let love’s firе burn/Long enough to melt.” Melt, that is, either party’s heart. But at least in this instance, both people in the relationship are “mutually callous,” with Sebert recounting, “Loneliness is all/We shared right from the start/We didn’t wanna fall/We tried so hard to protect our hearts/But we had something that was hotter/Than a fire in hell on those special nights.” But yeah, that “fire couldn’t melt through the ice” of their respective “big city hard shells.” This being both a bit tragic and also why Sebert talks about how it’s “Fun to Be Young” on the subsequent track of the same name. It’s here that she most reveals her “Kesha sensibilities” in terms of touting the wonders of having a great time, albeit done with a Debbie Harry-like voice and some Huey and the Lewis-inspired musical backing.
Moreover, when Sebert chants, “It’s fun to be young,” the intonation isn’t totally unlike Huey Lewis assuring, “It’s hip to be square.” Even if that sentiment is a totally opposite message to what Sebert is saying. Which includes reminding listeners that, ultimately, you’re as young as you feel. Or, as she phrases it, “Society puts some years on you, it did the same to me/And it’s still the way wе look at things/That keeps us fun and free, oh.” In Kesha speak, that would translate to, “So, while you’re here in my arms/Let’s make the most of the night like we’re gonna die young.” And also, “Tonight we’re going har-har-har, ha-ha-hard/Just like the world is our-our, o-o-ours/We’re tearin’ it apar-par-par-p-p-part…/We’ll be forever young, young, y-y-y-young/You know we’re superstars, we are who we are.”
During the song that follows, “Stuck By the Lightning” (complete with the gloriously obvious opening sound effect that goes with it), Sebert reverts to “vulnerability mode” as she likens the “love at first sight” kind of feeling she gets for someone to being, you guessed it, struck by lightning. It’s a song that has a certain parallel to what Charli XCX would sing about on 2022’s “Lightning,” during which she, too, expresses a similar analogy in the form of, “You struck me down like lightning, lightning/My stupid hеart can’t fight it, fight it/So tell me what you want and I’ma give it to ya/Likе lightning/Blinded, blinded/You took me down, I don’t mind it, mind it.”
Correspondingly, Sebert paints the portrait of her own blindsidedness by love when she wields the weather to delineate the wearing down of her defenses, illustrating, “I knew a storm was coming in/I could feel it in the air/There was no use in running/When I saw you standing there/I was struck by the lightning/Struck by the lightning/Struck by the lightning in the night/I was struck by the lightning/Struck by the lightning/Struck by the lightning in your eyes/You, you hit me so hard I’ll never be the same/My resistance to love has been charred I’m naked in love, burning flame.”
The otherworldly, supernatural tone to the music and vocals transition nicely into a track like “Vampire”—which Kesha herself once recorded as a demo in her own early days of seeking an entrée into the music industry. Sebert’s original version was already released in 2021, at which time she had also mentioned the fact that she had lost this part of her voice about five years prior, circa 2016. Bringing up this painful reality again in 2025, Sebert told Rolling Stone, “I don’t know what happened, but it’s something to do with my age and probably menopause. But I just opened my mouth to sing one day and a big chunk of my voice was gone, so there was not the option to re-record anything.” Thus, she had to settle for resuscitating the dusty masters the best she could. No small feat, to be sure. And yet, something about their ability to be restored speaks to their own vampire-like quality, living forever, as it were.
In Sebert’s vampire romance (because it’s always at least somewhat romantic when a vampire is involved), it’s almost as if she presaged what Bret Easton Ellis was going to do in “The Secrets of Summer” section of The Informers, characterizing L.A. as a city of vampires in more ways than one. Something Sebert and Kesha both know all too well. In any event, Sebert, like Easton Ellis after her, alludes to the fine line between what’s real and imagined when she sings, “It’s hard to tell out in this crazy town/It’s hard to know sometimes what’s real/I never know when you will come around/I never know just how I feel/Lacey curtains on my window flutter in the wind/When the room gets icy cold, I know you’re coming in.” Even if vampires are only supposed to be able to come in if expressly invited. But perhaps Sebert knows more about the loopholes to these rules, having told Paper magazine in 2021, “I was such a tragic sort of lost soul in my youth, not a bad person, but… just an addict [who] didn’t know how to function correctly. So I definitely am like a vampire in some ways. I literally had to die and be reborn as a different person in order for this music to come out.”
And she did it not “If Only For You,” but for herself. As she put it to Rolling Stone, “There’s very few things that I deeply regret in my life. This was literally the one thing I couldn’t get past.” Which is to say, not being able to have this record see the light of day…until now. That Pebe Sebert has had such an incredible, long and circuitous journey is also another poetic foil to what her own daughter had to endure in order to get to this point of autonomy in her career, with circumstances at last aligning to ensure both women’s hard-won path to musical freedom would pay off for both at the same time. For Kesha, that meant getting out from under Dr. Luke’s clutches and being able to start her own label; for Sebert, that meant getting the songs “out of storage” in time to be the first artist with an album on Kesha Records. And though she might try to modestly chalk the album up to being nothing more than “just a look inside the brain of a crazy girl in the eighties who is living her best life, or at least it seemed like it at the time” (side note: this is something Kesha could just as easily say about the 2010s), it’s much more than that. Not just a musical document of/window into the era, but a testament to the love Sebert has for her craft—which is precisely why she passed on that same love and passion to Kesha.
At a taut eleven tracks (this being the standard amount in the 80s, when eleven was “a lot” and nine was seemingly the norm), Sebert rounds it all out with a concluding ballad called, as mentioned, “If Only For You,” which has a certain tonal connection to “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You.” Written with an almost premonitory view of the future (yes, a nod to “Premonition”), Sebert asks her proverbial “lucky star,” “How do you know when I stumble?/I said I was fine on the phone/Still, you always know when my spirit’s been broken/I guess love has a line all its own/I’m gonna make it, if only for you/When my strength is gone, you always come through/And give me a reason that I can hold on to/I’ll fight for love, if only for you.” While it might not have seemed like it at the time, it’s as if these words were written for all of her children, and especially Kesha, who has been her most ardent and supportive fan, encouraging and helping her to make Pebe Sebert a reality at last.
Kesha might be an even bigger fan of her musical parent than Lana Del Rey is of hers. To that point, because Sebert isn’t a “nepo parent” the way Lana Del Rey’s dad, Rob Grant, is (with Sebert, funnily enough, having commented after Grant posted the artwork for his own album, Lost at Sea, back in 2023, “Is he single?”), this project isn’t “annoying,” so much as it is heartwarming. A chance to not only let a girl realize the full extent of her dreams as an older woman, but to also better appreciate where Kesha’s own tenacity and talent comes from.