No Puppet, Kelly Clarkson Makes a Shift
HENDERSONVILLE, Tennessee — There were more than 200 radio programmers milling around the back of Kelly Clarkson’s stately lakeside home on a Thursday evening here, sipping drinks named after songs from her new album and snapping selfies. Ms. Clarkson and her husband, Brandon Blackstock, who is also her manager, were introducing the record, titled “Meaning of Life,” to the people who could either help make it a blockbuster or bury it.
After the giddy crowd filed into a tent, Ms. Clarkson made a low-key entrance in a black dress. She greeted the crowd warmly, then started announcing songs with an uproarious, profanity- laced monologue that covered her voluminous hair extensions, Spanx and admiration for the pop star Pink (“If I did want to like a girl, it would be her”). In a corner, members of Ms. Clarkson’s label team weren’t huddled together, cringing — they were grinning and applauding.
“Kelly doesn’t try to be anything she isn’t,” Julie Greenwald, the chairwoman and chief operating officer of Ms. Clarkson’s record label, Atlantic, said later.
There are pop stars with no filter, and then there is Ms. Clarkson, a music-industry unicorn. After winning the first season of “American Idol” in 2002 when it was just an untested reality-singing curiosity, she became one of the television show’s few discoveries with staying power. She has collected three Grammy Awards, notched 11 Top 10 singles and sold nearly 18 million copies of the seven albums she released on RCA Records, her previous label. It is impossible to make it through a night of karaoke without hearing someone grasp for the high notes of her quintessential kiss- off anthem, “Since U Been Gone.”
But perhaps more remarkable, Ms. Clarkson, 35, has remained a major pop player for a decade and a half without checking the usual pop-star boxes. She’s not an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure like Beyoncé, or a social-media chess master like Taylor Swift, or an outsize persona like Lady Gaga.
Like Adele, she is known for her tremendous voice and her fearlessness when it comes to speaking her mind.
“I don’t want to be trained to talk,” Ms. Clarkson said in an interview the day after her radio soiree. “I’m not a puppet, I have a brain.”
Ms. Clarkson is hoping “Meaning of Life” speaks loudly, too. After finishing her RCA contract, which came with her “Idol” victory, she is making what she considers her first real artistic statement. Leaving behind the pop-rock that became her signature sound in favor of the soul that has captivated her since her youth in Texas, she is asking her audience to leap with her into more mature, nuanced sonic and emotional territory.
Showcasing her voice in its full glory was one of Ms. Clarkson’s primary objectives. “I wanted to make a record that I could really sing the [expletive] out of,” she said.
Her starting point was her favorite artist: Aretha Franklin. She and Craig Kallman, who was an executive producer of “Meaning of Life” with Ms. Clarkson, asked, “What if Aretha was born now and made a record today?”
They didn’t want the album to sound old. “So it’s just not nostalgic, it’s not a retro experience,” Mr. Kallman said in a phone interview, “but it’s really a modern experience infused with the best of those records we call standards.”
She understands why fans feel an extra sense of ownership over her. We witnessed her “Idol” journey in real time. We heard the personal stories she shared in songs like “Because of You” and “Piece by Piece,” which describe feeling abandoned by her father following her parents’ divorce.
“I actually don’t mind that,” she said, “because I feel a certain level of pride that people even feel like my journey is that important in their life. That’s cool, for someone from Nowhereville. I just mind when people all of a sudden feel like I’m one thing.”
The centerpiece of “Meaning of Life” is a feisty throwdown called “Whole Lotta Woman,” which alludes to the size of her waistline, her attitude, her self-worth and her mouth using references to Southern cooking.
Debuting the track for the radio promoters at her home, Ms. Clarkson couldn’t hold back. She sung along and bounced to its outro’s bassheavy groove.
“I don’t want to hide the fact that I am a successful, strong- minded, opinionated —” she said the next day, cutting herself off to make another point. “Sometimes I get it wrong, but I learn — but I have a voice.”
From ‘Idol’ to pop stardom, insisting on being herself.