Kesha fans have long been acquainted with her mom, Pebe Sebert, who’s been a fixture in her daughter’s album credits since day one, cowriting hits including “Your Love Is My Drug” and “Timber.”
And while the true stans know that Sebert, 69, started her career as a country songwriter — most famously writing “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You,” which became a hit for Dolly Parton — fewer listeners are aware that she tried to embark on a pop career of her own in the 1980s. As Sebert tells it now, that was always the plan, despite her country music success.
“Pop music was always where my heart was, but I have to be honest, when I wrote the first song, ‘Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You,’ and it became a great big hit, and I went from having to wait tables to having somebody pay me to write songs — I was like, ‘Oh, well, I don’t have to sing country [music], but this was so easy,’” Sebert recalls in an exclusive interview with Us Weekly. “But that was a big joke, that was a big trick, because it wasn’t easy to write another one like it. And so I definitely tried to write as a writer of country, but I always aspired to be a pop singer.”
After moving to Los Angeles, Sebert connected with Guy Roche, who went on to produce albums by Cher, Celine Dion, Brandy, Selena and more. At the time, synthesizers had exploded in popularity after becoming more affordable, so Roche and Sebert began playing around in the studio.
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“Then it was definitely no turning back, because you could be anything or be anywhere,” she explains. “He could put accordion and tuba and harp on. It was just the most exciting thing that ever happened to me.”
With Roche and other producers, Sebert ultimately recorded an album’s worth of songs, but for various reasons, it never came out. While it wasn’t possible to self-release music back then as it is now (no SoundCloud), Sebert partly blames herself for failing to follow through on label interest.
The cover of Pebe Sebert’s self-titled debut album. Courtney McElravy/Kesha Records
“Unfortunately, I was the one that fell apart,” she explains. “I was the one who disintegrated prior to completing contracts and picking a label and doing it, so I definitely feel like it was meant to be just the way it was. I love what I hear now, but I wouldn’t want to be that girl. I wouldn’t want to be that lost young woman that I was.”
Now, more than 40 years later, Pebe Sebert the album is finally coming out, thanks to Sebert’s famous daughter, now 38. The self-titled LP is the first non-Kesha release on Kesha’s personal record label, Kesha Records, and Sebert couldn’t be happier with the way things have gone.
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“It feels like it literally couldn’t be any more perfect,” she tells Us. “If I wrote a script, this would be the perfect ending to it, and I’m just really proud of her, of what she’s gone through, and how she’s come out on top with her own record label. She told me, without any prompting on my part, that she’d like to release my record as her first release other than her own music, which was such an honor and such a beautiful mother-daughter moment. So, I’m just thrilled.”
Having been there the first time around, Sebert can hear the imperfections in the songs, which were recovered from the “unstable medium” of old tapes, but to a modern listener, it just sounds like she was going for a gritty, lo-fi sound. It’s easy to imagine “Hard Times Ahead” or “The Ice” fitting in on a playlist alongside ’80s classics by artists like Kate Bush and Berlin. In other words, Sebert could have been a star — but she’s OK with the fact that it didn’t happen that way.
Kesha with her mom, Pebe Sebert, on April 10, 2025, in New York City. Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Empire State Realty Trust
“I probably wouldn’t be alive. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be,” she says, imagining what would have happened if the album had come out 40 years ago. “I definitely was on the brink of being a serious drug user and definitely an alcoholic. I was very close to that. And had I become famous and had all the money and people saying yes to me that you would have as a famous person, I don’t believe I would still be alive. I would have probably just been one of those sad statistics. So, I think it’s all happening the way it was meant to happen.”
Sebert has no plans to perform live, as her voice “broke five or six or seven years ago,” but she’s glad her fans can hear the album now — and it sounds like more Kesha songwriting collaborations are in her future.
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“When it’s me as a songwriter, the best thing I can do is know enough about the person I’m writing with to know where they like to sing, what they like to sing about, and even most important is all the little details about somebody’s life,” she explains. “Like, this bad boyfriend and this bad boyfriend, and this time that this thing happened, and this best friend that stabbed you in the back — like, I know all that information.”
That closeness, she says, is what makes their working relationship so wonderful.
“I really feel like we’ve written some of the best things together,” she says. “There’s so many of the songs we’ve written that are some of my favorite songs I’ve ever written, just because her life feels so much like it’s part of mine that it feels like my life, even if it’s about her.”
Pebe Sebert’s self-titled debut album is out now.
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