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Pebe Sebert's dreams of becoming a professional songwriter started coming true when Dolly Parton recorded one of her songs and it became a hit. But Pebe felt like a fish out of water, and she used alcohol to deal with those feelings. Other drugs came into the mix, too. But after she had her daughter Kesha, Pebe knew something had to change -- and years later, Kesha became the pop star Pebe always dreamed of being.

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Back From Broken is a show about how we are all broken sometimes, and how we need help from time to time. If you’re struggling, you can find a list of resources at&nbsp;<a href="http://backfrombroken.org/">BackFromBroken.org</a>.

Host: Vic Vela Lead producer:&nbsp;Emily Williams Editor:&nbsp;Erin Jones Additional editorial support: Jo Erickson, Rebekah Romberg, Kibwe Cooper, Andrew Villegas Music: Daniel Mescher and Brad Turner with additional music from Universal Production Music Executive producers: Brad Turner, Kevin Dale Thanks also to Rachel Estabrook, Hart van Denburg, Jodi Gersh, Clara Shelton, Arielle Wilson, Kim Nguyen.

<a href="http://backfrombroken.org/">BackFromBroken.org</a> On Twitter: @VicVela1

Vic Vela: This episode contains some strong language, so please be advised.

Pebe Sebert always knew her daughter would be a star.&nbsp;

Pebe Sebert: Kesha was about two. And I just had this flash that this little kid's gonna be, well at that point in time, it was, she's gonna be as famous as Madonna. You know I just had a really strong hit that she was gonna be a performing artist.

Vic: And Pebe was right. Her daughter, Kesha, became one of the biggest pop stars in the world. [Soundbite of Kesha concert] Kesha’s been nominated for Grammys and has put out a couple of number one albums in her career. But before that, it was Kesha’s mom, Pebe, who was gonna be the star. She was a talented songwriter, writing hits for some of the biggest names in music. But, instead of ascending to stardom, Pebe descended into the darkness of addiction. So when Pebe was raising her daughter, she couldn’t deny that her desire to see Kesha succeed was connected to this feeling that she had something to prove.

Pebe: She wanted to be famous, but I wanted her to be famous even more than she wanted to be famous. You know, I would be a liar if I told you I wasn't trying to prove something to everybody – to everybody whose toilet I cleaned when I had to come back here and clean toilets. I can say I've been to the top and I've been to the bottom. I've been in the private plane, and I've cleaned your bathroom. I've done it all. Vic: Pebe’s has had a lot of ups and downs in her life. Addiction derailed her solo career as a musician. But her love of music and writing songs was still there when she emerged in recovery. I’m Vic Vela. I’m a journalist, a storyteller and a recovering drug addict. And this is “Back from Broken” from Colorado Public Radio. Stories about the highest highs, the darkest moments and what it takes to make a comeback. Pebe Sebert says music was always part of her destiny, even from a very young age when she was growing up on a farm in Indiana.

Pebe: It was just me and my parents and a bunch of animals. And I just told my mom one day I was gonna make records and write songs when I was like two years old.

Pebe: Nobody did that in our family. It wasn't like we were a musical family, but I just kind of came in with that destiny, I guess. The singing, I started singing right away and was like, you know, sang at school and sang at church, ever since I was, you know, five, six years old. But then, you know, by eight or nine I started writing.

Vic: And do you remember that first song you wrote?

Pebe: I do remember it. It's not, it's not a deep song. It's called “My Lover Fell Down the Toilet.” It went, [singing] “My lover Fell down the toilet because he was a turd who was formed by a giant with a constipation problem.”

Pebe: I know. It's awful. It's awful. And the fact that I remember it is pretty awful, too. But I remember being in a closet at home and I wrote that and I thought I was brilliant [laughter].

Vic: Pebe was just starting to tap into her songwriting prowess, and she was having a lot of fun doing it. But she felt really out of place as a kid… and found new ways to cope with that.

Pebe: Like I just felt like a complete outsider from day one. I always felt like that person, that everybody had been given a set of instructions and somehow I wasn't there for those. And I walked in late and I always had this feeling of just looking around, like, what do you guys all know that I don't know. It was just a feeling of not understanding. And you know, it made me feel like for a long time I used to say I was from another planet, which, you know, I still joke about that, but I just, I think part of the disease of alcoholism and my disease started with food and then morphed into drugs and alcohol. I was just a more person, like more food, more, you know, shopping, more drugs, more alcohol, more whatever. I wanted more attention, more everything. My problem was always more.

Vic: You know, we can't get enough booze, we can't get enough food. We, you know, if there's cocaine left anywhere, we're gonna do it right? Like it's, it's just give us whatever you got.

Pebe: Yeah. So addiction is definitely, I do feel like I had the disease I was born with, the disease I had that, that hole. Like, I never felt quite right. In my little Catholic school, I was a weird little weird little fucking kid. I really was, sorry, maybe I’m not supposed to cuss –

Vic: It's a podcast, you can say whatever you want [laughter].

Pebe: So I was a weird little kid and I didn't fit in, but then I'd get up on stage and sing it like the talent contest or the church I'd go sing. And I was so nervous and shaking that, you know, my pediatrician gave me Valium probably in first grade. I learned very young that if I had any kind of emotional problem, I just needed to go to the cupboard. It's like if you felt sad, you took this, if you felt nervous, you took this. As soon as I got, when I got a little heavy, I went in and the doctor gave me diet pills. So this whole up and down thing started, you know, very young. As soon as I got my period the doctor gave me a prescription for a codeine-laced some sort of a thing. So I had my pain relievers, my uppers and my downers all prescribed by the pediatricians. You know, it was always about trying to go up, not too much, but far enough and then come down and then mellow out with some of this, it was always this whole, uh, chemistry project.

Vic: Yeah, I, you know, the landing gear is what I call it [laughter]. You know, if you're, if you're too high, then you get something to bring you down a little. You know, it's, it's, you're always just trying to find that, you know, it's like a recipe, right? That you're just trying, you're trying to get it perfect.

Vic: When Pebe was 19, she took her singing and songwriting dreams to Nashville. And she started like a lot of musicians do – waiting tables and getting by before that big break happens. But not even Pebe could have ever imagined just how much her career would skyrocket after co-writing this song that was recorded by the one and only Dolly Parton.

[Soundbite of “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You”]

Vic: “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You” would become a number one hit on the country charts in 1980.

Pebe: It just became a hit. So all of a sudden I go from being this person who is where they were supposed to be to all of a sudden being way farther ahead in a very short period of time than I was mentally prepared for. You know, all of a sudden I went from being the waitress to the person at like the – they weren't CMAs back then, but we got like an award the year after that. Johnny Cash and June Carter came up to me and told me how much they love the song. So I'm just, you know, I feel like, you know, like an elephant, in the middle of the, you know, the fancy banquet. Like I just don’t feel like I belong.

Vic: Life coming at you fast. Yeah. My gosh, you were still such a young person, a waitress yesterday …

Pebe: I was just not like, prepared to be that far. And so I kind of just fell apart emotionally. And just started drinking a lot more because the only way I could go in and be in these situations that I was now in, I was so insecure and so, um, felt so unprepared that I had to drink. You know, I would keep a bottle of schnapps in my purse. So when I'd go into co-writes at nine or 10 in the morning, if it was a big name, I'd like, see who it was. And sometimes I'd start shaking before I walked in the co-writing room and I'd just go in the bathroom and slug, you know, quarter of a bottle of the schnapps and then start to walk outta the bathroom. And if my knees were still shaking I'd go back in and drink another big slug. Once again it was, you know, how far down do I need to go to calm my nerves ‘cause I'm so insecure. And then how far up do I have to go so I can actually write a song?&nbsp;

Vic: On top of that, Pebe was struggling to adjust to married life with her new husband, Hugh Moffatt. They wrote the “Old Flames” song together.

Pebe: We had a seven day courtship. You know, we didn't know each other well. I didn't know anything about him. We had this initial – basically I met him on the day that he had signed his record deal. So from that point in time until we got married, you know, and we were drunk the whole time. So how much do you know about a person? So obviously things got to the point where we had decided to split up by about two years into the marriage. And then right before we did, he came back to the house and said, how about if we just go out for a year? We had a big old yellow van. Take the dog and let's go travel around the country and give it one more shot. And me and Hugh and the dog, Bernard, got in the van and we traveled for a year. And in Denver, as a matter of fact, Hugh’s manager, Chuck Morris, ran the Rainbow Room. We'd open up for Chuck and some of his bands at the Rainbow Room and Red Rocks.

Meanwhile I was working at a disco called The Lift. I was cooking food and waiting tables and um, I think Hugh was doing construction work. And lo and behold, sometime in Denver I got pregnant. You know, taking a trip like that, as most addicts know, you know, when you really get in trouble, one thing that a lot of us like to do is, you know, go somewhere new.&nbsp;

Pebe: So all of a sudden the problem isn’t us, there's something new and exciting. it sounded good and it actually seemed like a great idea, but I just, all it ended up doing is prolonging the inevitable and adding a child to the mix, which I thank God every day for that child. But, um, it didn't really change the fact that we were not a very compatible team to begin with. Vic: Pebe got pregnant with her oldest child on that trip, and they eventually moved back to Nashville. It was still Pebe’s goal to be a singer herself – a true pop star. And after a quick break, Pebe gets her chance at that dream.

By the mid-1980s, Pebe’s dream of becoming a famous singer was within her grasp. She was in Los Angeles a lot, working on her first record.&nbsp;

Pebe: I would end up in the studio starting Friday night with a gram or two of coke or whatever and us musicians would just be fucked up the whole weekend. And we had the, you know, the pager number of the drug dealer. There was a lot of coke. You know, it's just coke makes you think you're the best thing that ever existed [laughter].

Pebe: Which is kind of what you need when you're in the middle of trying to, you know, do something like that. So, it was tumultuous, and it was crazy, but like, it was really, you know, it was amazing times and amazing music that came out of it. I had two record companies fighting over me and I was supposed to go in the studio to record with this big producer like the following week. So I think it was a Friday night that Hugh had called me and said, just kind of out of the blue that he had fallen in love with Lagan, our son's Montessori school teacher, and that he was gonna leave me for her. He was gonna bring the – Lagan out to me in Los Angeles so he could go spend the summer with this other woman.

He'd let me know at the end of that summer if he was gonna stay with her or come back to me. But if it was me, I'd have to make some changes in what I was, or something to that effect. But that was like one conversation and I left the room, wrote the song “Hard Times Ahead.” I mean, that just happened in a matter of like an hour.

Vic: Wow. So like right away, like you, this heavy life thing is happening right now, and then you're just like, I'm writing this song.

Pebe: I wrote this song like, like literally didn't even talk about it.

[Soundbite of “Hard Times Ahead”]&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

You found another, she’s there in our bed / You've got a lover, and I got exactly what I said I wanted / Alone's what I said / There's gonna be some hard times ahead

Vic: After that weekend of writing through heartbreak, even though Pebe was halfway through recording her album and achieving her dreams, she walked away from everything.

Pebe: I literally disappeared. So I no longer had an income or a place to live. This friend of mine, Mark Williams, who was John Williams, a big composer's son. He was playing with Crosby, Stills and Nash. We went and slept in the rehearsal hall, in the drum cases for a few nights in Crosby, Stills and Nash, their rehearsal hall. And this is all the week I'm supposed to be going in the studio to make a record for A&amp;M records. And I just like ended up looking, found this duplex out in the valley. It was like two, $300 a month and I had a mattress in the back of the yellow van and I just went there and the only person who knew where I was was a drug dealer. And it was not a pretty scene over there for a while, but, you know, life went on.&nbsp;

Pebe: I was on welfare by that point in time. Like. The same person who'd been at awards shows, you know, a couple years earlier was, you know, I was on welfare. It was crazy.

Vic: When did crystal meth enter your life?

Pebe: So I couldn't afford cocaine anymore.

Vic: Oh, it's cheaper. Meth is cheaper.

Pebe: So basically I just was doing meth for the next couple years. Once you've done meth daily for a year, like I would take a little straw full of meth and stick it in my coffee every morning. And that was my morning coffee.

Vic: Well, a lot of people don't, who don't know what meth is like. I mean, you talk about just putting a little, little of it in your coffee, like people put sugar or cream in their coffee. It, it just becomes a normal thing to do.

Pebe: You know I was very much of a lone, like a lone drinker, a lone drug user. I didn't want company. I wanted to be by myself with my drugs.&nbsp;

Pebe: I felt so trapped by my addiction. I felt so – like I was in a prison.&nbsp;

Pebe: You know, I was a slave to that addiction. I had no free will, no free choice. It was a terrible feeling.

Vic: Absolutely. Well, let's talk about when you started to bring yourself out of that. What, what was it that motivated you to start that process of recovery?

Pebe: Well, you know, the bottom line is, I decided to have another child, and I went through the pregnancy and I was not sober. By the time Kesha was probably a year and a half old, approximately, I was having trouble getting meth. I had a new dealer in Compton. So I took Kesha, she was in her car seat in the front seat. Of course that's before put kids in the backseat. And I had the drug dealer in the passenger seat. She was in the middle and I was in the driver's seat. And as he's going in to try and cop this meth for me, I look over and here's this guy with a machine gun pointed at my head.

Pebe: And that was literally the moment when I said, God, if I live and if Kesha lives, if this guy doesn't pull the trigger, I will never do an illegal drug again.

Pebe: And, you know, I, and that guy, I'm looking at this guy and I'm looking at this guy and all of a sudden that guy flung the door open and started running, and the guy like slowly cruised up with his machine gun following the guys. He ran up the street, and I like literally looked like Starsky and Hutch, you know, doing a, you know, getting out of Compton and getting on that fucking freeway and literally like praying all the way from Compton back to Van Nuys. And I kept my word. I never did another illegal drug again.

Pebe: Thank God I had a girlfriend, Mindy, who's still my best friend. I called her up and I said, Mindy, can you take care of my kids for a week or two? So basically she took my kids for two weeks. And I, like, spent two weeks trying to like slowly, you know, slept for like a week and then … I would drink pots of espresso. So it took about two weeks for me to get up. And then I, the first thing I did when I could drive is I would drop my son off, Lagan off at school every morning. And Kesha and I, who was like by this point just, you know, a little over a year and a half, we'd go down to this AA club and we would just sit there and go from one meeting to the next. We'd dump ashtrays, and we'd eat donuts and all. It was all these old crew guys crews from the movies, it was over like in Universal City. So like everybody that went there were these old, like, gaffers and grips and people like that. People who'd been, you know, scenery people, and they were kind of a rough tumble bunch. Kesha, I remember some of her first words were like, the Lord's Prayer and, “Keep coming back.”

Vic: Wow. A few years into her sobriety, Pebe took the kids and moved back to Nashville, where Pebe started all over again.

Pebe: I told my dad, I said, he was still up in Indiana. I said, I'll give it two years. If I don't have a good publishing deal, I'll come back and just do real estate with you, and I'll leave Nashville. But it took two years of waiting tables and cleaning houses. I mean, I cleaned the toilet for somebody that I helped get their first job. I, you know, I waited on somebody that I helped get a job at ASCAP. Like, I really got completely, you know, taken down. You know, I mean, I'm not gonna say that I didn't need it, ‘cuase I definitely had a big ego prior to that.

Vic: All that time, Pebe was nurturing the talent she saw in her daughter, Kesha. She believed from the time Kesha was a little girl that she’d be a star. For her, it wasn’t “if” Kesha would become famous, it was “when.”

Pebe: All her entire life, whenever we'd talk, like I remember in kindergarten she came home one day and she goes, I have something really exciting to tell you. And I'm like, what? She goes, remember how we were gonna have the hot pink limo when we go to the Grammys? Well I've decided it's gonna have turquoise on top.

Pebe: And so it was never like, are we gonna go to the Grammys? It was always like, when we go to the Grammys …

Vic: How are we gonna get, like what are we gonna be in when we get to the Grammys? That's amazing.

Pebe: And she would draw the dresses she was gonna wear to the Grammys. I have pictures of her and her kitty cats on the way to the Grammys. You know, so it was literally like her entire life. And all my friends and all her friends growing up were like, yeah, you two are crazy. You always said this is gonna happen. And it happened exactly the way you said.

Vic: Kesha was indeed nominated for two Grammys and performed at the show in 2018. Kesha brought Pebe with her to the event. Pebe has been a big part of Kesha’s career – and not just as her mom, but as a collaborator. Pebe’s co-written some of her daughter's biggest hits, like the song, “Your Love is My Drug.”

[Soundbite of “Your Love is My Drug”]

Your love, your love, your love / I don't care what people say / The rush is worth the price I pay / I get so high when you’re with me / But crash and crave you when you leave…

Vic: The lyrics stand out to me as someone in recovery and someone who's been in love.&nbsp;

Pebe: Right. Vic: I don't care what people say, the rush is worth the price I pay. I get so high when you're with me, but crash and crave you when you leave. I mean, there's a lot of you in that writing.

Pebe: Oh yeah. Well that's, you know, that's why we're such good writers together because she knows me like the back of her hand and I know her like, well obviously I, I know her better than she knows herself. It's a very, it's a very privileged place to share with an artist like that when you get to work with them and write from that point of view. Like you have to know somebody to really write a song for them.

Vic: You've been through so much together. Um, and let me just ask you, I mean, how big of a trip is it to, to, you know, knowing just x-amount of years ago, you and Kesha – little baby Kesha – are going to these AA meetings together. And now you're writing songs and you're going to the Grammy's together.

Pebe: It’s crazy. I mean, I don't think I've ever really processed it fully to be honest with you. Cuz when you say that it sounds amazing and I'm trying to think of it from an outsider's point of view, and I'm like, wow, that is amazing. But like, I don't think I've ever, you know, really thought of it from an outsider's … You know, once that fame thing started to, um, swirl, it's like a tornado and it kind of … Fame is like a tornado that sucks everything in around it. And depending how close you are to it, is gonna be how, um, how discombobulated your life will become. It's not a good thing. It's not a healthy thing, it's not a nice thing. There's nothing nice about fame. You know, from a point of view of recovery, it's a terrible thing because it makes you think somehow you're special. There's a different set of rules for you. Everybody else has to follow these rules except for you.

Pebe: It's an ego. It's a, you know, it's just like gasoline on the fire for an ego, which is the exact opposite of what you want in recovery.

Vic: Pebe was sober for 19 years – from that first AA meeting she went to in L.A. up until 2007 when she relapsed. Several years later, Pebe and Kesha both went to rehab: Pebe for her addiction, and Kesha for an eating disorder. Their relationship was strained for awhile. But they never stopped writing songs together.

Pebe: Like that's always been our one gift that we've had. We've written our way through it. And, you know, that was a lot of times my only real, you know, really heartfelt contact with her for years. It's taken, you know, it's almost nine years. I'm gonna have nine years of sobriety January 13th. And I'd say it's taken that whole time. It really, you know, and a lot of it had to do with – I hadn't taken the responsibility for things like not being sober when I was pregnant. It's something I'm very ashamed of. But you know, it's shit you go through and you, when you've got addiction in a family, it can tear families apart. And I feel pretty lucky that, you know, if we're out of the woods on it now, you know, I feel like we're getting toward the end of it. We just spent a couple weeks together and like, you know … When our idea of doing, having good time together is ordering like Tocaya the, the, you know, Mexican food and watching “White Lotus.” Like, that's a really great time for us. And petting the cats.

Vic: Let me just ask you, how do you feel about your recovery nowadays?

Pebe: Oh, I feel great. I feel really, like I have a great sponsor. I'm, you know, still doing these hardcore nine steps. They're pretty deep work. But, uh, you know, I feel like my recovery's good. I have a great home group. I go to Al-Anon. So, I'm getting all my bases covered.

Vic: Pebe’s recovery was instrumental in her starting a nonprofit that saves the lives of homeless dogs and cats in Central America. It’s called the Magic Mission, where Pebe raises money to help get animals spayed, neutered and adopted. To bring more attention to the Magic Mission, Pebe dug through some old songs she wrote back in the 1980s for the album that she had walked away from. Now, she’s releasing them for the very first time.

Pebe: I was very devastated at the idea that I had these songs that I loved so much. And I finally had like managed to, um, put something down on tape that I thought was what I wanted. And then I, like, disappeared and sort of blew my own career, I really grieved that for years. So it's really kind of like digging a dead person up, you know? To like have these songs, like who would've known, you know, 30 years ago or 1985, whatever, that's how many years? I guess that's almost 40 years ago. Who would've known almost 40 years ago that there would be the ability to put this stuff out just on your own 40 years later? And I'm very grateful for, you know, all of it. Even the hard times. I mean, I know better than to think that anything good would be happening in my life if I hadn't been through those rough times. But like, it makes everything even more joyful and beautiful now.

Vic: “Back From Broken” is a show about how we’re all broken sometimes and how we need help from time to time. If you’re struggling with addiction, you can find a list of resources on our website, backfrombroken.org. “Back From Broken” is a production of Colorado Public Radio's Audio Innovations Studio and CPR News. Our lead producer today was Emily Williams. Find a list of all the folks who worked hard to make this episode in the show notes. Thanks for listening to “Back From Broken.” Please review the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It helps other people find it. This podcast is made possible by Colorado Public Radio members. Learn about supporting Back From Broken at cpr.org.

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