Kelly Clarkson Ignores the Same Red Flags With Olivia Rodrigo ‘Bad Idea Right?’ Cover

Olivia Rodrigo’s single “Bad Idea Right?” is turning red flags everywhere green — or at least into an indecipherable shade of gray. Kelly Clarkson is the latest to ignore the warning signs about letting an ex back into her orbit as she performed the record during a recent Kellyoke segment on The Kelly Clarkson Show.

Clarkson performed “Bad Idea Right?” with My Band Y’all and two backing vocalists who built out the layered harmonies across the song. The singer bolstered her performance with a few acrobatic vocal runs, but also with the emergence of her Texas accent on the pre-chorus.

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By now, Clarkson has performed enough of Rodrigo’s music on The Kelly Clarkson Show to create her own Olivia Rodrigo (Kelly’s Version) EP. In 2021, during the show’s second season, the pop veteran performed “Drivers License,” Rodrigo’s historic debut single. During season four, Clarkson covered the heartbreaking Sour ballad “Traitor.” The latest cover marks the third Rodrigo song to be performed in the show’s fifth season, following the vengeful Guts single “Vampire” and “Can’t Catch Me Now” from the soundtrack of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

Rodrigo stopped by The Kelly Clarkson Show as a guest earlier this year, and the pair spent a couple of minutes of the interview gushing about their mutual musical idol, Alanis Morisette. “I’m so proud of you!” Clarkson told her. “Because you’re 20. I’m sure someone has it somewhere but when Sour came out, I was like ‘oh this chick is like the new Alanis for her generation.’ You’re like the new Alanis for your generation. It was that kind of impact of the [record].”

One of the biggest lessons Rodrigo recounted learning from listening to Morisette was that she has the freedom to say whatever she wants without asking for permission. That realization opened up her range as a songwriter across both of her albums, but especially Guts. On “Bad Idea Right?” she unabashedly declares, “Haven’t heard from you in a couple of months/But I’m out right now and I’m all fucked up.” And elsewhere on the album, on the somber deep cut “Making the Bed,” she admits: “Sometimes I feel like I don’t wanna be where I am/Getting drunk at a club with my fair-weather friends.”

Last year, in her Rolling Stone cover story, Rodrigo shared: “I have a lot of young girl fans, and I’m very conscious of that. But also, it’s real. All of my role models are my role models because they’re unapologetically who they are. I can’t cherry-pick parts of myself to express. And if that’s the worst thing that I’m doing, then I think I’m doing pretty well.”

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