Kelly Clarkson couldn't keep it together the first time she performed Chemistry
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Kelly Clarkson is nearly halfway through playing her upcoming album, Chemistry, for the first time, at a one-night-only event in April at L.A.'s Belasco. She's in the midst of explaining to the sold-out crowd that its title track is about how two things can mix and create something beautiful, or react negatively and explode, when there's an eruption of noise from the audience. At first she thinks it's cheering, but it's not — a fan has passed out. She quickly requests a medic.
Fortunately, that fan winds up being fine and returns to watch the show 30 minutes later. But even before that uneasy moment, Clarkson has been hitting pause for reasons of her own. Just a few words into her first number — the soaring ballad "Skip This Part" — she suddenly stops singing its a cappella intro, already overcome by the first of Chemistry's four tearjerkers she'll perform.
"I'm sorry, y'all," she tells the crowd. After taking a second to collect herself, she jokingly calls out the four-piece string section surrounding her on stage. "If y'all weren't so damn good!" she exclaims with a laugh.
Brian Bowen Smith Kelly Clarkson
But the nerves are justified. While it is Clarkson's 41st birthday and there's plenty to celebrate — she is serenaded with "Happy Birthday" not once but twice by fans wearing party hats, as well as by her band and special guests — tonight is about more than Clarkson's latest trip around the sun. Chemistry covers her seven-year marriage to Brandon Blackstock, which ended a few months into the pandemic and subsequently made her the focus of countless headlines as she endured a rather public divorce.
When she announced the Belasco show on social media, and even on her eponymous Emmy-winning daytime talk show when she first performed the single "Mine" in April, Clarkson admitted that she "went through a lot" and was "angry and sad" while writing the songs for her 10th LP, 14 tracks total. Visuals that have been released for it seem to confirm it: She is clad in black in various photos as well as on the album's cover, an image of her in a pink dress that can be peeled away to each side to reveal her in a black one. On stage for her birthday show — which is being recorded to accompany other visuals she'll put out with the record for a project that will take the place of traditional music videos — Clarkson maintains that mood, looking emo-regal in a flowy black dress that sweeps the floor, her blonde hair longer than what we're used to seeing on her show, more like in the album art.
Atlantic Records Cover art for Kelly Clarkson's album 'Chemistry'
But Clarkson insists she's in a good place now, and — apart from in those brief moments during "Skip This Part" — the supportive crowd has no reason to believe otherwise. She is more like the daytime host or the mentor we've seen coaching contestants on The Voice the past five years: self-deprecating and funny as she shares anecdotes about how "mama was pissed" when she was writing certain tracks — such as "Red Flag Collector," which kicks off with a Western-movie-showdown whistle — or how she was drawn to one that is actually a cover of a song written by Rachel Orscher and happens to share the name of her Montana ranch, "High Road."
She promises the album is not about just the divorce, but the whole of her relationship. Sure, Chemistry was born out of its painful conclusion, but there were good times, too — the heartbreak is balanced with happiness. For every emotional gut punch like "Mine" or its companion single, "Me," she offers something a little more dynamic, if not in lyrics then with her production choices. At the Belasco, she dares the crowd not to dance to "Favorite Kind of High," a cut she hopes becomes a single that recounts those butterflies you get when you first feel attracted to someone. She says her favorite new song is "Magic," about the type of love she thought "didn't exist" and was just "for the movies."
Meanwhile, on the lively "I Hate Love," she name-checks two films, telling the crowd that one of them, It's Complicated (a favorite), is more like real life, "not like that bulls--- they sell you in The Notebook." The track, which features actor and accomplished banjo player Steve Martin — who also starred in It's Complicated and is mentioned in the song — juxtaposes its pissed-off title with an upbeat country-pop vibe.
"I love that territory. I love hearing something kind of poppy and then it being either angry or super sad," Clarkson tells EW. "I also have to use humor as a healing mechanism, a coping mechanism. I do that all the time. So I was writing a love song and I was just angry. I was like, 'God, why are you still so into something that was so bad?'"
Looking back a week after the concert, Clarkson admits she didn't expect to be so consumed by her feelings but concedes, "The emotions kind of murdered me." Her response was especially surprising to her given that the show's two nights of rehearsals were tear-free. "It was pretty flawless and easy and great," she says. "I was almost proud of myself. And then all of a sudden it was just like a wave washed over me."
It wasn't, of course, the first time she felt it. A range of anger, heartbreak, and grief revealed itself in the 40 to 50 songs Clarkson penned in the immediate aftermath of her split, and then again and again while working on the album. While she's "definitely very honest" in the music and wanted it to be what "people are probably expecting" from her, she reveals that some tracks she wrote were "too truth-telling" to make the cut and served as a private opportunity for her to vent. "I know people will hear this record and be like, 'Oh, damn, she went there!' and I'm like, 'No, I promise you I didn't,'" she says with a laugh.
Chemistry's songwriting may feel familiar to anyone who heard Adele's 30 or Kacey Musgraves' Star-Crossed, both released in 2021 and about those artists' divorces. But Clarkson isn't worried about comparisons. All of her songs were written before those albums came out — and, she says, the women's stories and experiences are all different. "No matter what album you're listening to, it is kind of nice to have these people that went through stuff that other people are going through, and you just don't feel alone in it," Clarkson says. "Because I'll tell you what, that's the worst: when you're in a crowded room or you're smiling for America while doing your job and you just feel so sad and alone. That's the worst feeling ever."
Atlantic Records Kelly Clarkson
Now, with the album's impending June 23 release and her 10-night Las Vegas gig, which kicks off in July, Clarkson has to revisit all those emotions. Full separation isn't an option.
"That's just going to take time — which is annoying. I don't like that," she admits. "I will sing 'Because of You' and still remember why I wrote it at 16. It's hard for me not to tap back in because I feel like it's my job to emote what the lyrics are. It took time for me with 'Piece by Piece,' with 'Hazel Eyes.' It just takes time to... not really separate, but to get to where you can remember it but you don't drown in it. You dive in, but you're treading water."
She continues, "I'd love to be the brave person that says, 'I'm gonna kill it in Vegas.' But after my birthday, I have no clue." She laughs. "Pain can still feel real fresh when one is still, daily, trying to come out on the other side. I don't have control over it. But what I do have control over is the fact that I know I don't have control over it, so it's fine. It's supposed to be what it's supposed to be. You have to learn to let that go and live in the moment, whatever it is."
For that moment in April — her "Birthday at the Belasco," as she dubbed it — Clarkson treats the audience to a finale of two of her biggest hits, songs that fit into the Chemistry story in their own way: "Miss Independent" and "Since U Been Gone." But not before she welcomes to the stage singer and drummer Sheila E., who is featured on her new track "That's Right," and who steals the mic from Clarkson to celebrate her artistry, transparency, and willingness to be so raw on the album.
But their collaboration, the album's closer, is "fun" and "sassy," Clarkson says that night. With this one, she wants the crowd to know that mama got her groove back.
Chemistry is out June 23.
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