![]() ![]() On the Jepsen-assisted “favorite kind of high,” Clarkson sings with breathless desire, desperate to be taken home. Yet while the latter’s thoughts on romance have the soothing sugar rush of a dream, Clarkson’s are more grounded in specificity. From its psychedelic title track to the vibrant, ’80s-inspired “magic,” she manages to mirror the giddy, scintillating ecstasy of Carly Rae Jepsen’s best love songs. “I’m always pleasin’ someone, honestly, now I’m done.”īy Act Two, Clarkson’s focus is infatuation as she pivots to the challenge of finding a new partner amid heartbreak. But here, Clarkson admits to outgrowing her upbringing and credits her own personal progression: “Now I’m older, I’ve learned some lessons,” which she details further on “me,” a track dedicated solely to herself. “My mother told me to put others before my own needs,” she says, a direct callback to “Because of You” and the burden of carrying her parents’ stiff-upper-lip mentality into her own life. On “skip this part,” electric-guitar solos soundtrack Clarkson’s move from self-pity to accountability as she sings of “numbing the pain away with sweet Mary Jane.” “High road,” an early album highlight, finds her veering into cinematic dream-pop territory as she tries to shirk the lessons she was taught in childhood that have come to harm her as an adult. The first details the teething pains of post-breakup life. The album’s journey from anguished bereavement to the joy of self-sufficiency is split into three acts. ![]() But while “now I’m single” projects from the likes of Adele, Kacey Musgraves, and the Chicks felt strangely glossy and overconceptualized, Clarkson’s approach is more representative of the rough-hewn arc of marital dissolution. Part of a string of recent high-profile divorce records, Chemistry represents Clarkson at her most venturesome and liberated. Inspired by her 2020 split from her then-husband, music manager Brandon Blackstock, it catches the former Idol in the act of transformative revelation, charting the long and painful journey from enervating heartbreak to self-reliance. For the first time in her recording career, the 41-year-old’s heartbreak is told from her own lived experience. Ever.”Ĭhemistry, her tenth album and the first with all-new material since 2017, represents something different. “But I have never said the words I love you to anyone in a romantic relationship. “I know people probably think I’ve been heartbroken because of the stuff I’ve sung and written,” Clarkson told Elle in 2007. The universal message of “Since U Been Gone” might have packed an emotional wallop for listeners, but it existed without the context of a real-life sob story. But while those two were frequently making music that went hand in hand with their own worlds and what the tabloids were writing about them, Clarkson was recording depersonalized breakup anthems uninspired by her private life. Still, she managed to more effectively assert her own viewpoint than she had on her first project, turning “Behind These Hazel Eyes,” “Since U Been Gone,” and “Because of You” into breakout hits.īy then, Clarkson, with her deliberately modest clothing choices and laid-back candor, was being positioned as a corrective to the remote seductiveness of pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. He also forced her to work with Max Martin and his then-protégé Dr. Clive Davis, then the head of her label, famously hated “Because of You” (and detailed in his 2013 memoir that Clarkson was a bad songwriter who wasn’t fit to write for radio). Meanwhile, her sophomore effort, 2004’s Breakaway, arrived through a series of power struggles. Her hit-and-miss debut, 2003’s Thankful, sounded like RCA didn’t know what to do with her: push her toward the soulful sentimentalism of “Some Kind of Miracle,” the snappy pop of “Miss Independent,” or the style of melismatic ballad she excelled at on Idol. Instead, Clarkson’s early career would be defined by creative conflict. (In December of that year, the New York Times referred to her as “thoroughly generic.”) The Texas native’s sheer charisma and irrepressibly chirpy attitude seemed to naturally resist such a rendering, and by the time she was voted the show’s first winner, the tabloids had little material to play with: no drugs, no juicy love life, no bad behavior. But producers neglected to exhibit Clarkson’s dreadful upbringing - growing up in a broken home without her father and siblings, her apartment that burned down a year before her Idol audition - in the same maudlin fashion. To help viewers better connect with its contestants, the program, then in its first season, ran segments between performances that highlighted the artists’ often tragic backgrounds. In 2002, American Idol introduced us to Kelly Clarkson, an anti-glamour, anti-gimmick singer with vocals as potent as a lioness’s roar.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |