Die Young - Ke$ha

Artist:

Ke$ha

Written by:

Ruess, Nate/Walter, Henry/Levin, Benjamin/Gottwald, Lukasz/Sebert, Kesha

Ke$ha's 'Warrior': The Billboard Cover Story

When Ke$ha burst onto the scene in 2009 -- rapping through an Auto-Tune filter about brushing her teeth with whiskey and boys trying to "touch [her] junk" -- the then-22-year-old quickly positioned herself as pop's resident troublemaker and made the charts her home. In sales week that ended two days after Christmas of 2010, her bratty debut single, "TiK ToK," smashed the record for highest single-week sales for a female solo artist with 600,000 digital downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan (the previous record-holder, Lady Gaga's "Just Dance," sold 419,000 one year earlier), and soared to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Dr. Luke- and Benny Blanco-produced anthem took just 11 weeks to top the chart, holding the peak position for nine weeks on its way to becoming the longest-running No. 1 debut single by a female artist since 1977, and the highest-selling digital single of all time, second only to the Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling," with almost 14 million copies sold.

Ke$ha's debut album, "Animal," crowned the Billboard 200 when it arrived at the top of 2010 with 152,000 copies in its first week, according to SoundScan. Driven by an attractive $6.99 initial price point, it leveraged the sales record of "TiK ToK" with iTunes' Complete My Album program and took full advantage of the holiday shopping season with a preorder program that launched Dec. 15, 2010. The result was another digital benchmark, this time for sales of a No. 1 album.

A series of top 10 hits, including "Your Love Is My Drug," "Take It Off" and "Blah Blah Blah" (featuring 3OH!3) followed, and in November 2011, Ke$ha once again shot to the top of the Hot 100 with "We R Who We R," the lead single from the EP "Cannibal," which was also included in the deluxe-edition repackage of "Animal." "We R Who We R" bowed at the peak position with more than 280,000 digital downloads. Ke$ha, who co-writes her own songs, was a hit factory, mining chart gold.

That is, until she took a break. After touring as the opening act on the North American leg of Rihanna's 2010 Last Girl on Earth tour (which grossed $13.1 million from 18 reported shows, according to Billboard Boxscore) and then headlining the Get $leazy tour last year (grossing $2.1 million from nine shows), the Nashville-raised singer went on a month-long sabbatical before taking on her sophomore LP, "Warrior" (RCA/Kemosabe). Now, with "Warrior" set for a Dec. 4 release and lead single "D ie Young" gaining at radio (it's the Greatest Gainer this week, despite falling 13-14 on the Hot 100), Ke$ha is back, much to RCA's relief.

"I had the label breathing down my neck to come back and make a new record, and I kind of had to tell everybody to fuck off for a month," says the singer/songwriter born Kesha Rose Sebert. When her solo tour wrapped in September 2011, Ke$ha dropped out of the public eye after Rio de Janeiro's Rock in Rio Festival, making stops in South Africa and other locales before returning to the States in late October. She calls it a "spiritual journey," a chance to get off the road and back to herself and the land: "I needed to get my head back on straight and sleep in the dirt for a little while. And then I came back and have literally been working on my record ever since."

After a 14-month break from the top 40, Ke$ha returned to the upper reaches of the charts with the release of "Die Young" on Sept. 25. RCA chose WHTZ (Z100) New York to debut the track as part of Clear Channel's iHeartRadio World Premiere program on the "Elvis Duran and the Morning Show," which reaches 7 million listeners in 50-plus markets each morning. For the first day, it played the song every hour. The response was so strong that Z100 moved the cut to its "power new" category, playing the song every other hour to give it maximum exposure.