A close encounter of the third kind inspired aspects of the new Kesha album, Rainbow. “That’s been a huge, running theme on this album,” she divulged on the Zach Sanger Show. On the day she released “Praying,” her first single in about four years (and her first since her legal battle with producer Dr. Luke) Kesha spoke to Sanger about her new record, which has flying saucers on the cover and a song called “Spaceship” in the track list. She recalled the moment the song spawned from:
“I was in Joshua Tree, totally sober. Let me preface: completely fucking sober. It’s not a big deal, but I think people would be like, ‘She was on acid’ or something. I wasn’t. I was on nothing. I was a totally sober Sally, just lady in the desert. And I look up in the sky and there’s a bunch of spaceships. I swear to God, there were like five to seven. And I don’t know why I didn’t, like, try to take a picture of it. I just looked at it. I was sitting on a rock. And I was like, ‘What in the hell is that?’ And I was trying to figure it out. Then they went away. And then they came back. And then I was like, ‘Maybe there’re are fires on a mountain, really high up in the sky.” Then they went away and I was like, ‘Maybe the fires went out.’ Then they came back in a different formation and I was like those are fucking aliens! Those are spaceships!”
Kesha says she was always a believer in the extraterrestrial, but she just had never seen one before. “They look exactly like what they say they look like,” she said. “They look like little balls of fire in the sky.”
Rainbow is due out August 11.
