Kelly Clarkson’s Captivating Divorce Album

Kelly Clarkson’s voice was always wasted on saccharine ballads such as “A Moment Like This,” the début single that she released, in 2002, after winning the inaugural season of “American Idol.” In the two decades since, Clarkson has proved to be a chameleonic singer, capable of working her way around a wide range of musical genres and production styles. At the peak of her popularity (and her vocal might), in the late two-thousands, she seemed most at home performing loud, vibrant rock songs that could nonetheless blend in among the comforts of pop radio. To my mind, Clarkson was like a new evolution of Ann Wilson, the powerhouse front woman of the rock band Heart. During live performances, Clarkson would get in the face of her guitar players as she belted high notes, swing her hair at a violent pace, push the volume past ten. In an alternate time line, where the spectre of “Idol” didn’t perpetually hover over Clarkson, she might have been talked about as one of the great rock singers of a generation.

In recent years, though, Clarkson, who is forty-one, has turned her attention to a daytime talk show, “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” which she hosts weekday mornings with Everywoman aplomb. Aside from an album of Christmas songs, in 2021, Clarkson hadn’t released an album of original music since her soul and R. & B.-inspired “Meaning of Life,” from 2017. But in 2020, after filing for divorce from her husband of nearly seven years, Brandon Blackstock, Clarkson hinted at new music, claiming that she was writing the “most personal” album she’s ever made. Last year, she said that she’d been working on the record for two years, and that she’d done the Christmas songs because it had provided a joyful break from the difficult realities of her life. That project-in-the-making, “chemistry,” is finally out, and it is a worthy entry in the annals of breakup albums, a musical gesture that teases, entices, and—for better or worse—provides the public a window into a relationship gone bad.

Perhaps the defining song of Clarkson’s career thus far, “Since U Been Gone,” is a breakup anthem, but a joyful one—an ode to the liberation found in an ex’s exit. The effectiveness of that track, which appears on Clarkson’s second studio album, “Breakaway,” hinged on the fluidity of that “U.” Both heartbreak and the relief at having survived it were offered up as universal feelings. The ex in question was vague and malleable; a love-scarred listener could affix her own target to it. “chemistry” is less interested in such universality. The “you” on this album is a known entity. Listeners, even those eager to project their own heartbreaks onto Clarkson’s unfolding dilemma, are nudged into the role of voyeur. The album, whose producers include Clarkson’s frequent collaborators Jason Halbert and Jesse Shatkin, opens with the sparse “skip this part,” featuring Clarkson, her voice cracking and intimate, singing, “Can I skip this part / When I fall to pieces.”

A breakup album is best when it takes in the full arc of life with another person—what it was like and could be like, both the wishing and the desperation that sets in when the wish falls apart. “chemistry” succeeds in this regard. The album’s fourteen tracks don’t adhere to a single mood or state of mind. They are not only angry or grieving or resigned. Some songs are deliciously scathing, like the robust and polyphonic “me,” which finds Clarkson with a quiver of arrows, taking aim and firing at a rapid pace: “Your insecurity was the death of you and me”; “I never gave you reasons, you’re the one with secrets”; and, during a bridge that swells with a choir of backup vocalists, “I bet you feel the absence of my love every night.” Other parts of the album function as a sort of grateful exhale, among them the soaringly catchy “high road,” which, with its shouts of electronic synth and chunky drums, sounds pulled from an early-eighties Cyndi Lauper-esque venture. In the lyrics, Clarkson runs down the ways that she has coped with the public scrutiny of her relationship’s demise: “It’s just my ego and my pride / I live my life in disguise.” On many of the songs, including “lighthouse,” the album’s Big Sad Ballad, Clarkson sings in a torrential flow, like a person who has held her frustrations and aches inside for too long. Time has let her anguish ripen and mellow, turning rageful grievances into something more resolute and defiant. The chorus of the song “down to you” features a driving repetition of the phrase “Can’t bring me down.”

The most tender space that the album occupies rests somewhere between sadness and yearning, between grief for what was and excitement for what could come next. If you have been in love with a person for a long time and then have fallen catastrophically out of love with that person, it can be hard to make sense of the possibility of moving on. The very idea might prompt feelings of denial, refusal, a type of disbelief. The title track on the album is a trepidatious love song. Against a background of a lightly played acoustic guitar, Clarkson sings, “I don’t really trust you and I don’t trust me / You know, chemistry, it can sneak up on ya.” In “i hate love,” Clarkson admonishes the sappy romance movie “The Notebook” for being full of lies while exalting the divorce rom-com “It’s Complicated”: “You can keep Gosling, and I’ll take Steve Martin,” she speaks in a rushed, exasperated tone. (The song, by the way, features Steve Martin on the banjo.) It is a silly lyrical detour that also gets at real questions about the absurdities of desire.

A hallmark of Clarkson’s previous albums was their sonic consistency. It often seemed as if she and her producers had begun with a broad idea for a sound template (“A big rock album!” or “A nineties-soul album!”) and built out each project from there. “chemistry,” by comparison, is more stylistically scattered, and it struggles at points to reconcile colliding sonic ideas, sometimes within a single track. The dissonance worked for me on the song “rock hudson,” which short-circuits its own momentum midway through with layered vocals over a collision of drums and screaming guitars (and, at one point, a synth line that sounds alarmingly like the “Stranger Things” theme song). In other spots, the lack of cohesion was jarring, as in the aforementioned “i hate love,” which begins with Martin’s gentle banjo plucking before morphing into an electronic, drum-heavy escapade.

What I like most about “chemistry” is how effectively it cashes in on Clarkson’s just-like-you public persona. The Kellyoke segment of her talk show is beloved because it cannily plays into the relatability that Clarkson has exuded since her “Idol” days: loose, free-form, and fun, it approximates the feeling of doing karaoke with a friend (you know, the one friend who can actually sing really well). For the same reason, though, an EP of Clarkson’s karaoke covers released last summer seemed strangely inert. When polished and produced in a recording studio, the songs lost the off-the-cuff charm that defines the Kelly Clarkson persona. “chemistry,” in contrast, successfully preserves the aura of interpersonal intimacy that Clarkson has cultivated with audiences for two decades. Part of the delight of the album is how it performs earnestness, letting the listener into the darker corners of Clarkson’s life. This is an illusion, of course. Even at their most vulnerable, pop artists are still pulling off a type of magic trick. But the trick works here, perhaps better than it ever has with Clarkson. As a listener, you feel like you’re observing a veteran’s bid for resilience in real time. ♦