Kesha's Anxiety Got So Bad She Thought It Was 'Psychotic Break'

As Kesha continues her evolution as an artist, her mental health struggles have come through more and more in her lyrics — something she opened up about in a recent interview promoting her fifth studio album, Gag Order.

The singer spoke with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about her new song “Eat the Acid,” saying that it was written about her experience having “this full psychedelic kind of trip sober.”

“My brain felt like… I thought maybe it was the process of having a psychotic break or something,” she said. “But then once I just started leaning into it, I was like, ‘Well, it’s happening, so what am I going to do about it?’”

“Eat the Acid” takes on a more haunting tone than much of Kesha’s past music — as do a number of songs on her latest album, which was released last week. Throughout the track, she frequently repeats one lyric in particular: “You don’t want to be changed like it changed me,” before telling the listener her mother warned her “don’t ever eat the acid.”

While her own trippy experience may have stemmed from overwhelming anxiety rather than drugs, she also shared that she dived into looking for otherworldly answers as a result — something that isn’t all too surprising considering her well-documented love of the uncanny.

“I’m a triple Pisces, I love weird, unexplainable, spiritual, supernatural stuff,” she said. “So after this happened to me, I went down a total… it’s my rabbit hole I’m currently in, is just the paranormal and also different spirituality, different things people believe in. I’m just trying to read about it because I fee like we’re all talking about a similar thing.”