Nothing is remotely done yet, and Ke$ha is only available for a three-week stretch, so he and fellow producers Benny Blanco and Ammo are hard at work coming up with rough tracks for the singer to put her stamp on. How many songs are they planning on adding to the “Animal” reissue?

“I’d like as many as eight, if possible,” Gottwald says. “But I’ll be happy if I got four or five great ones. And a lot depends on the next two weeks.

Source: Billboard

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Lukasz Gottwald — the writer/producer better-known to the explosive-chorus-loving world as Dr. Luke — has booked all three rooms at Conway for the entire month of September. He’s told his manager to cancel all meetings, and you might have to excuse him if your call goes to voice mail. The deadline task at hand: Coming up with enough new songs for his protégée, Ke$ha, to get a deluxe repackaging of her debut album out in time for the holiday buying season.

Nothing is remotely done yet, and Ke$ha is only available for a three-week stretch, so he and fellow producers Benny Blanco and Ammo are hard at work coming up with rough tracks for the singer to put her stamp on. How many songs are they planning on adding to the “Animal” reissue?“I’d like as many as eight, if possible,” Gottwald says. “But I’ll be happy if I got four or five great ones. And a lot depends on the next two weeks. She has a single right now, ‘Take It Off,’ which is doing pretty well. Last time I checked, it was No. 11 on iTunes. Normally, an artist would be stuck in a fourth-single slump by now, so that’s encouraging. But who knows. Two weeks from now, research could come in and say that song won’t go as far as we had anticipated, and then that’ll mean we need a new song right away.”

If Gottwald’s attention to chart detail sounds a little bit (as his nickname might suggest) scientific, he’s positively a rocket engineer when it comes to the arts and sciences that take place inside the studio control room, where he’s known as a genial perfectionist nonpareil. He sweats the small stuff. But that sonic fussiness hasn’t gotten him bogged down so much that it’s kept him from racking up the most commercially enviable career in pop production at the moment.

Stats speak even louder than beats. On the Billboard Hot 100 right now, he’s responsible as a co-writer and co-producer for 40% of the top 10: Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite” (No. 3), Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” (No. 2) and “California Gurls” (No. 7), and Ke$ha’s “Take It Off” (No. 10), which is defying a fourth-single slump. (He would have claimed half the top 10 if B.o.B and Rivers Cuomo’s “Magic” hadn’t slipped 11-10.) He can claim four of Billboard’s 20 top-selling digital singles of all time, with Ke$ha’s 5 million-selling “TiK ToK,” Flo Rida’s “Right Round,” Perry’s “Hot N Cold” and Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.”

Then there are the earlier smashes that might’ve made that list had they been released later in the digital singles sales revolution, like Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and “Behind These Hazel Eyes,” seminal collaborations with mentor Max Martin that put him on the pop map five years ago. That Gottwald was named ASCAP’s songwriter of the year in April probably counts as a performing-rights no-brainer.

In the coming months, Gottwald will co-executive produce Britney Spears’ 2011 project, alongside Martin. For his own label, Kemosabe, whose sole release so far is Ke$ha’s “Animal,” he’ll be working with his latest signings, female singers Sabi and Sophia Black. Meanwhile, taking off his executive hat, he’s still involved in plenty of production one-offs, like an upcoming single for British powerhouse vocalist Jessie J (who co-wrote “Party in the U.S.A.” for herself before sacrificing it to Cyrus).

For the last five years, Gottwald has provided a veritable soundtrack for adolescence and young adulthood, assuming the mantle of Tycoon of Teen that’s been passed down from Phil Spector. There’s hardly a ballad to be found in his catalog, which is full of rock-tinged dance-pop with an unabashedly ecstatic quality that makes even middle-aged top 40 listeners feel like they’re living the teenage dream, to paraphrase Perry.

“His hallmark is ‘tempo’ records-at worst, they’re [midtempo]-coupled with über-melody and great concepts,” RCA/Jive Label Group chairman/CEO Barry Weiss says. Consider the fact that many of these concepts have involved some form or another of cheeky female empowerment-see Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” Pink’s “U + Ur Hand” and Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend”-and he could almost be considered an avatar of girls, or girl-lovers, everywhere.

But Gottwald, who will turn 37 in a few weeks, resists the suggestion that he might concoct these hits with the image of a teenage girl with an iPod in mind. His awareness of research and chart stats notwithstanding, he swears he’s his own target audience.

“Apparently my taste is that of a 13-year-old girl,” he jokes. “Not really. But my taste is commercial. Listen, there’s been times in my life like the two years that I only listened to jazz, and probably nothing after 1966. When I went to the Manhattan School of Music, the library didn’t have anything after 1966. In order to get good at that, I had to tunnel-vision and focus on that.

“But sometimes when I talk to those kinds of people, they’re like, ‘What is it like making this simple music?’ They look down on it. And I’m like, ‘No, you don’t get it. I actually like this. I don’t see a difference between brilliance in one and the other.’ There’s no compromise to me in what I’m doing. I’m trying to make songs that I love and make them feel a certain way and go to certain places. It just so happens that a lot of 13-year-old girls like that.”

“I tried to rewrite the verses of ‘TiK ToK,’ ” Ke$ha says. “I was like, ‘This doesn’t make sense. “Brushing your teeth with Jack Daniel’s”-are people going to get what I’m talking about? Is this too much? Is it clever enough?’ And he literally had to fight me off, and then Benny Blanco had to chase me out of the studio when I got a mind to rewrite it. He kept saying, ‘It’s good. Just trust me, it’s good.’

“He really lets me be myself. All the crazy shit I say, he embraces, because he really embraced my personality. A lot of producers have tried to tone it down. And I wouldn’t be as successful as I have been had I been watered down.”

“Here’s the thing about Ke$ha,” says Gottwald, who’s sitting at the board at Conway, about to play a track he and Blanco have been working on for her. “She’s really smart, and she knows some of the stuff is really stupid. So the part of her that knows music and is educated will be like, ‘Really?’ And I’m like, ‘No, if it’s dumb and it’s catchy and it works, it’s cool.’ Artists in general, and myself included, have a tendency to overthink things. Sometimes my job is to prevent people from changing stuff.”

He fires up a track they’ve already worked on with Ke$ha. As usual for her, it’s an all-synth sound.

“A lot of people have asked me, about her first record, ‘How did you come up with the new sound? Your sound evolved!’ ” It was a new approach born out of necessity. “That was Ke$ha. She calls the shots, and she said, ‘I don’t want any guitars on my record.’ I managed to sneak one or two in there . . . But you have to evolve. Music is changing all the time.”

There’s an unfinished chorus on this new track, in which Gottwald is singing through such distorted Auto-Tune, it’s impossible to tell what he’s saying-which is deliberate, so he won’t unduly influence Ke$ha when she comes up with her own lyrics.

Source: Billboard

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The 23 year old hit the charts last year with TiK ToK, a track about her hard boozing and partying ways.

But the star doesn’t understand why she has been slammed for promoting drinking and clubbing to her teenage fans – because there is no reason a female performer can’t be as wild as her male rocker predecessors.She tells Britain’s Daily Mirror, “You’d have to have no pulse not to come to my show and not have fun. David Lee Roth could be a total bada** running around, drinking whiskey and jumping into the crowd. I see no reason why a woman can’t do that.

“A woman who is hot, has a good time and drinks is often seen as a whore or an alcoholic. But I’m neither of the two.”

Source: Contact Music

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The 23-year-old pop singer-songwriter previously spent nine weeks atop the Hot 100 beginning in the Jan. 2 issue with “TiK ToK.” Follow-up “Blah Blah Blah,” featuring 3OH!3, debuted and peaked at No. 7 three weeks later – when “Animal” debuted atop the Billboard 200 – and “Your Love Is My Drug” rose to No. 4 in June. (Ke$ha’s Hot 100 discography includes an additional top 10, although 3OH!3’s “My First Kiss,” on which she guests, appears on the band’s album “Streets of Gold.” The song reached No. 9 in May).

Source: Billboard

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“Right before I go on stage, I lather my body in baby oil and cover my entire body with a shield of glitter. Because it just pops! It just looks great! It’s really hard to get the glitter off. I’ve just given up. I’ve accepted that it will just be there. It’s in all my suitcases, it’s usually in my food, in my drinks. Sometimes when I pee, it’s in the toilet, I don’t know how it got there.”

“I like digging through thrift stores and sometimes the garbage — yes it’s true! — sometimes the garbage. It’s not like I’m going to go into the garbage with crusty food on it, all garbage is not equal. But if I see a pile of pretty sweet-looking shirts laying on the ground, yeah I’ll dig through it! In my fantasy world, I would just wear headdresses and run around in body paint and a glitter diaper and that’s it. And because I can’t run around topless, I just put on the coolest shirt I can find.”

“At a part in my show there’s some audio that’s saying, ‘I’m the dance commander, and I’m commanding you to dance, dance, dance.’ And I think this [a feather vest] helps accentuate that I am in fact the Dance Commander. These are diapers [holding up gold sequin underwear]. They’re not really diapers, and that’s really not sexy. But this is where the magic happens, is in these puppies. You put these on and then it’s party time.”

“I’m not like one of those chicks that really cares. I could literally just wear whatever, I’m not picky and I think that’s the beauty of my style. I can kind of make anything look cool if you just tie it up or rip it or pin or safety pin it or put glitter on it.”

Source: MTV

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