When Pebe Sebert was raising her daughter, Kesha, she passed along a guiding philosophy about turning bad days into good songs. “This is how you get to be a great writer,” she’d tell her. “If you didn’t have a terrible day, you would have nothing to write about.”
Sebert knew all about terrible days, rough weeks, and even harder months. Nothing weighed more heavily on her than the 40 years she spent knowing her debut album might never be heard. “There’s very few things that I deeply regret in my life,” Sebert tells Rolling Stone over Zoom from her Nashville home. “This was literally the one thing I couldn’t get past.”
About a decade before Kesha was born in Los Angeles, Sebert worked as a songwriter around Nashville. She found success behind the scenes, but she’d come to the Music City to be a singer. By 1984, she began to make real strides towards bringing that dream to life. She’d met the producer Guy Roche, who worked in the basement of the publishing company Criterion Music. They crossed paths just as synthesizers began changing the course of pop music. The album they recorded was perceptive in its exploration of love, purpose, and youth. It was a snapshot of a breakthrough that never arrived as Sebert was knocked off course by addiction.
“I really held it against myself that I had basically fucked my life up so badly that the one thing that felt like it meant the most to me at that point in time ended before it got a chance to see the light of day,” Sebert says. It was a wound that time couldn’t heal, especially when she returned to Nashville after escaping to L.A. for years. “I always played the music for my kids,” she adds. “And there were just a few select people in my life who had heard the music who were like, ‘Man, this stuff would have been great. It would have fit right in.’”
Who says it’s too late? Today, after more than four decades, the singer-songwriter and music mom has released her lost album, Pebe Sebert.
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Despite the time that has passed, the 11-track record sounds oddly contemporary. Over the past few years, Eighties trends have surged back into pop by way of the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” and Kate Bush’s 1985 single “Running Up That Hill,” which found a new generation of fans in 2022 thanks to Stranger Things. “A lot of people brought this music up when Kate Bush had her resurgence because this stuff is so similar,” Sebert says, though she admittedly hasn’t spent much time with Bush’s work. “I heard of her and was compared to her at some points around the time that we were making the music … It’s funny how the creative minds ended up doing a lot of the same things.”
Sebert saw the same mirror between herself and Kesha, especially once her daughter started processing her worst days through music. “It turned everything around and made all the hard stuff feel so useful,” Sebert says. Over a decade ago, Kesha recorded her mom’s song “Vampire,” the original version of which was released in 2021 and became the lead single to Pebe Sebert. The singer also took interest in recording “Cities Burning” and “1945,” but never got around to it. Still, Sebert saw traces of her recording sessions with Roche when writing “Eat the Acid” with Kesha for Gag Order.
“Me and Guy had so much fun experimenting, I’ve got a pretty wild imagination, so my imagination just went off the charts,” Sebert says, looking back on their collaborations. “I was so inspired by the sounds we were able to make and that just inspired the music, which turned out to be pretty strange and cinematic.” They captured an uneasy sense of mystery on the suspenseful “Premonition,” and gave a gift to the dancefloor on “The Ice,” a pulsating record about passion not being enough to warm up a heart that has grown too familiar with loneliness and cynicism. She interrogates this more deeply on “Why?”
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“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,” Sebert says. “Boy, was I barking up the wrong tree. I had so much to learn.” She comes around to this lesson on “Nice Girl,” singing, “If you want a girl, who really needs you/A fragile toy to keep up on a shelf/Don’t waste your time, I will not deceive you/I can do just fine all by myself.” There’s some bite to her tone, but her voice is slightly restrained. The original recording tapes endured some weathering over the years they were lost. “It’s not digital, so it’s a real thing that actually disintegrates,” Sebert says.
Sebert compared it to the restoration process old paintings undergo at museums. Still, she is grateful to have any record of her old voice. Around five or six years ago, she lost it for good. “I don’t know what happened, but it’s something to do with my age and probably menopause,” she says. “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.” Pebe Sebert has been complete for a year, so she couldn’t capitalize on recent technological developments in AI, either. Having this album, Sebert adds, “made the loss not feel as tragic.”
She’ll miss singing background melodies and harmonies while writing songs, but she’s come to terms with the trade off. She also accepted that she was never really meant for the rock star life. “I truly believe in my heart, if I had gotten famous, I would have died,” Sebert says. “I was enough of a mess not having the money to do drugs the way I wanted to, that if I’d had unending amounts of money, I’m pretty sure I would not have survived.” She prefers the reality of experiencing that life in a healthier and safer way through her daughter.
Years after returning to Nashville, Sebert reconnected with Guy while shopping around for producers to work with Kesha, who was about 15 at the time. “He said, ‘Oh, she sounds like an Avril wannabe,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘OK, next.’ We just moved on.” Sebert was hyper-aware of how much had changed since they made her album together, particularly how his star continued to rise after she left. One of his most successful collaborators, Diane Warren, found her way to him after hearing the music he made with Sebert at music executive Don Grierson’s office.
“I basically didn’t connect with him for probably 10 years fully because I was so ashamed of myself and what a mess I’d made of my life,” Sebert says. “It took me a long time to recover, get sober, and try to rebuild my life. I was so intimidated by him that I just didn’t even feel like I could talk to him.” Sebert rebuilt her reputation and supported her children by writing country songs for other artists, all while her own album sat on the shelf collecting dust. When they reconnected again to restore and release the record, she finally felt like they were equals again.
“It’s 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,” Sebert says, reflecting on the record. Everything fell into place, even the label on which the album has been released. Pebe Sebert arrives via Kesha Records, an independent record label launched through Warner Music Group’s independent distribution arm ADA. “If I could have written out what would be the perfect thing to happen, that would have for sure been it,” Sebert says. “It doesn’t get any better than the fact that she’s weathered all her storms and come out and has her own record company. And then she, without me asking her, said she wanted my record to be her first release, which was so lovely and beautiful. It’s all perfect the way it is. I’m so proud of her.”
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Pebe Sebert shares parallels with another lost album released this year thanks to a musical family pipeline. In February, Hayley Williams’ grandfather unearthed his own shelved album from the Seventies, Grand Man. The record was released on her Paramore bandmate Zac Farro’s Congrats Records. “I just want to know someone liked what I did,” Rusty Williams said in a statement earlier this year. “I want people to see how it felt when things were real.” Sebert resonated with this deeply. “This was a time in my life when things were very real, like I was in the throes of all the emotions for the good or for the bad of it,” she says. “The best art is made by the craziest of people at the craziest points in their lives.”
Pebe Sebert marks the crossing of a finish line for Sebert, and she doesn’t plan on moving the goal post any further. “I’m not going to be making any more records,” she says. Now, her focus is on the Magic Mission, a nonprofit organization providing aid to cats and dogs in Central America. “There’s not another big thing other than continuing to do the work with the animals, that means everything to me now,” Sebert says. “I feel like this is a nice bow on my music career — not to say that I’m not going to continue to write, and not to say there couldn’t be a horrible family band at some point in the future with me trying to sing in my low, broken voice. But I’m pretty good with this.”
