Kesha Gets Emotional in Bob Dylan Cover
Kesha has a reputation as a pop party girl, but the ‘Sleazy‘ singer has a heart — and Bob Dylan‘s got a special place in it. Rolling Stone caught up with Kesha about her moving cover of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.’
Kesha nixes Auto-Tune and sings her heart out in the cover, conveying so much raw emotion that at times you can actually hear her cry. It sounds completely unlike anything the dollar-sign diva’s put out, and that was a deliberate move. “I didn’t want this to sound like a pop version of a Bob Dylan song,” Kesha told Rolling Stone. “That’s the last thing I wanted this to sound like.”
“I was looking through the lyrics, and reading them, and listening to the song over and over and just trying to make it as personal as I possibly could,” Kesha said. “I pulled up my Garage Band on my laptop and just sang through the song once, and by the end of it I was just crying hysterically alone in my bed.”
Not only did Kesha’s cover mark a huge shift in her own sound, it also reinterpreted the lyrics. Dylan has described the song as “a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better … as if you were talking to yourself,” but Kesha’s took a sharp turn to something much more heartwrenching. She and producer Bob Ezrin interpreted the lyrics as a suicide note from a female perspective.
Kesha revealed that the recording was one of the first quiet moments that she had to herself in three years, and the emotion is palpable. “There were particular lyrics in the song that you can just tell, once they came out of my mouth – the emotion caught up with me and I just started weeping,” she said. “It’s something that I didn’t plan on, that wasn’t contrived at all. It just sort of happened.”
Kesha’s cover is part of a Bob Dylan tribute, ‘Chimes of Freedom,’ to benefit Amnesty International’s 50th anniversary. For 24 hours, you can stream the entire album — which also features Adele, Lenny Kravitz, Miley Cyrus, Natasha Bedingfield, Maroon 5 and more — by “liking” Amnesty International’s Facebook page. The album will go on sale Jan. 24 with all proceeds going to Amnesty International.
Watch Kesha Talk About ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’