Reclaimed, Reborn: Kesha Rewrites Her History With ‘Tits Out Tour’ Success

Kesha and her team were backstage at a sold-out Madison Square Garden July 23 in awe of the audience while biting their nails. The roaring crowd gave the performer a standing ovation for 11 minutes, a wondrous sight for any artist, but also a concerning one for Kesha. The gesture was right up against the Garden’s strict 11 p.m. curfew, and the fine for going past it is steep.

The ovation ended within 40 seconds of the curfew, the team breathing in a sigh of relief and able to begin celebrating what was a victory for Kesha, born Kesha Rose Sebert, whose entire “Tits Out Tour” featuring Scissor Sisters, Slayyyter and Rose Gray was a stunning critical and commercial success. In addition to becoming her most successful run to date, this was also the first time she was able to set out on the road as a fully independent artist. This moment in the 38-year-old’s career has been incredibly redemptive.

“After having a lot of my freedoms taken away from me for the majority of my adult life, my main purpose is to become as free as possible in every way,” Kesha tells Pollstar. “And that’s an ever-evolving quest I’m on. There are certain limitations I’ve put in my own mind that I’m not even consciously aware of that are keeping me from freedoms in certain ways. The ways I talk to myself. I love becoming limitless in what freedom can mean in this life and the possibilities of where I can go on this quest.”

Though she doesn’t say it explicitly, the singer/songwriter was embroiled in a widely-covered legal battle with her former producer, Dr. Luke, which began in 2014. She never mentions him by name in this interview, and the suit was settled in 2023.

Kesha, though, refused to remain silent on her past, sharing her story with the public. While her journey initially played out on the public stage with a years-long lawsuit that dragged out in headlines, she wants her healing process to incorporate her audience, as well. And her artistic output reflects that, especially on her sixth studio album, Period, released in July and her first album as an independent artist on her label, Kesha Records. The lyrics in her single “Cathedral” touch on that healing process: “Ain’t it funny what breaks you / What you find when there’s nothing left to lose… I’m the cathedral / Finally coming home / Life was so lethal /But I’m the savior, I’m the altar, I’m the holy ghost.”

“My liberation was through telling my story, but in my situation, there are a lot of things I can never tell,” Kesha says. “So, I’m telling my story through my life’s work. I wanted the freedom of my story, and I wanted freedom from my story in my body, mind and spirit. It’s about accepting exactly who you are and what you’ve gone through, and having no shame around what made you, you, and really celebrating the parts of my life story that have made me a warrior and a fighter and celebrating the fact that we made it.”

Her appropriately-titled “Tits Out Tour” kicked off July 1 at the Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre in West Valley City, Utah, and included a stop at the iconic Kia Forum in Inglewood, California. She sold out amphitheaters throughout the run, and the first leg wrapped up at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Aug. 10. With 25 of the tour’s 26 dates submitted to Pollstar’s Boxoffice, the run sold 391,617 tickets, grossing $14.1 million – every single date sold out. On average, the tour sold 15,665 tickets, with a $567,560 gross.

On the heels of her surprise performance at Coachella and her slot at Lollapalooza in 2024, Kesha and her team, which then consisted of CAA’s Brian Manning and Crush Management’s Bob McLynn, wanted to maximize her moment. They began to put together the “Tits Out Tour,” aiming mostly for amphitheaters and not expecting the run to completely blow out as it did. Kesha’s last big run took place in 2018, an amphitheater tour with Macklemore. When her team began plotting this trek, they hoped to recreate the success of that tour. Instead, this became her biggest run to date.

Her manager at the time, Bob McLynn at Crush, and her agents, Brian Manning and Lindsey Myers at CAA, partnered with Live Nation and the late Ryan McElrath for “Tits Out.” Both McLynn and Manning emphasize how much faith McElrath had in the tour, and how unfortunate it was that he couldn’t witness its success first-hand. As this story went to press, Kesha switched management to Mary Hilliard Harrington at Red Light Management.

“Ryan had such an enormous foundation of respect for her,” Manning says. “He took this bet as much for myself and Crush as for Kesha. Following his passing, nobody was going to disrespect his legacy or intuition by not following through and knocking this out of the park.”

Tara Traub, SVP of Global Touring at Live Nation, took on the mantle to ensure Kesha, her team, and Elrath’s vision could be fulfilled. “Ryan really believed in Kesha and laid the foundation for this tour,” she says. “She truly embodies female empowerment, fearless and unapologetic as she connects with massive audiences night after night. Launching her biggest tour yet with sold-out crowds at venues like Madison Square Garden and the Kia Forum is a true career milestone, and it’s been inspiring to watch her bring this bold new era to life. We executed this tour in his honor, and I hope we’ve made him proud.”

Kesha spent months working on her setlist for the tour, reworking her old songs to reclaim them for herself and falling in love with them all over again. Split into five acts: “One of One,” “Heaven in Hell,” “Genius or Crazy?,” “Freedom Cunt” and “Period.”

Kesha’s setlist begins with her 2009 breakout hit, “Tik Tok.” She spans her entire six-album discography. Her process in creating the setlist for her tour was a journey with intense introspection, consideration and, at the end, catharsis.

“I realized that for me to come to peace with a lot of my old music, I had to take out all of the old production,” Kesha says. “So, I started there and I reproduced all of the albums before 2013 for the live show. And then I started going on dates with my albums and really trying to fall back in love with them. We have a very long relationship that, just like any human relationship, has gone through a lot of ups and downs.

“I wanted to be in a really good place with all my music before I went out and played it for the world and really just be in love with it all,” she adds. “I started by having dancing dates with my old music, and I would dance in my kitchen or in my bedroom and fall back in love with it. Then, once I fell in love with it again, I started piecing together what ways I can tell my life story. What songs go with which chapter of my life? That’s where the set list came from. I wanted to spare no detail and go through every part of my life.”

Manning notes of her shows, “Kesha can bring both an absolute party and simultaneously a very moving experience. When you go from ‘TikTok’ or ‘Timber’ to ‘Praying,’ you’re taken through this entire arc and journey over the course of a set. From a party to a meditation, a sing-along to a therapeutic moment. There’s a little bit of everything.”

By the time the tour kicked off, McLynn was already seeing momentum. Period was set to be released just days later, and already the album was generating buzz. The first date sold out, with 17,620 fans in attendance, and grossed $574,425 according to Pollstar Boxoffice reports.

“To see it all come together that first night at Salt Lake, that was just like, oh my God. I can’t believe we went from where we were to where we are,” McLynn says. “The sales started out decent, but didn’t really pick up steam until that last month going into the tour. We started seeing sellouts, and when we first went on tour, we weren’t sure that was going to be the case. After that first show in Salt Lake, we knew this was going to be a great tour.”

Kesha works to be grounded and healthy while on tour, wanting to lie in forests after a show but settling for parking lots if need be. She sets up rituals to root herself and has gotten into tarot and astrology practices. She journals and meditates, goes outside for yoga and takes vitamin D. Before she steps on stage, she does a gratitude meditation.
She carries that ethos through to her live performances with her stage setup hosting her altar filled with teeth from her late cat and various fans—it’s all part of who she is now and she doesn’t build walls between herself and her art.

“My spiritual practice is woven all throughout everything I do in the public eye, whether or not people pick up on it or notice the correlation,” Kesha says. “It’s the basis of everything that I do, trying to heal and stay in alignment and live as spiritual of a life as I can while also being a pop star. Which is a strange thing to try and balance, but I am trying.”

As Kesha speaks to Pollstar, her choreographer and dancers can be heard rehearsing in the background. She’s in the midst of preparations for her headline performance at All Things Go Festival near Washington, D.C., at Merriweather Post Pavilion, on Sept. 28, which will mark the end to the North American leg of “Tits Out.” But the tour is nowhere close to finished. Australian dates are slated for Feb. 19-28, with stops in arenas and Electric Avenue Festival in Christchurch, New Zealand. In March, “Tits Out” will make its way through Europe, kicking off in Berlin at Uber Eats Music Hall on March 4 with stops in Paris, London and more before wrapping at Dublin’s 3Arena March 21.

When it came to naming the run, Kesha wanted to carry through her message of reclamation and refused to shy away from the past, instead confronting it head-on – from the name “Tits Out” to how she presents herself on stage.

“I really had the rights to even my own body taken away from me,” Kesha says. “I feel like I didn’t live in my own body for a lot of my life. It was always serving something else, whether it was a public eye or an outfit or a vibe or an image. It felt like it wasn’t really mine. I wrote ‘Cathedral,’ and I realized my body really is my home and it is my cathedral and it is mine. And, for better or for worse, the whole world has seen my life. Pretty much everything a person could see about somebody’s life, the world has seen of mine. I wanted it to feel like I was letting go of any shame or judgment about anything I’ve been through. I’m sick of feeling shame for being a human being. That whole idea is ‘Tits Out, Baby.’ Be yourself and accept yourself. Love yourself and let people judge you.”

For Kesha, this tour, this album, this point in her life are what she has long dreamt of: taking her career back into her own hands and reaching new levels of success on her own terms. “I feel like I’m living in an answered prayer right now.”