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 Musi

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