Finding a ‘Meaning’
Kelly Clarkson’s new album chronicles her transformed personal life
Kelly Clarkson has life all figured out — starting with the fact that she’s calling from her bedroom.
“I’m living the dream, doing a phoner from my bed,” she says as a friendly hello.
Spending just a few minutes in Clarkson’s world is an exercise in grace. She laughs easy, drops a few gentle f-bombs and is quick to empathize with the total stranger on the other end of the line.
“You’re a writer, and as artists, we all have a reason why we do what we do. I think any artist — whether you’re a writer, a singer, a painter, a sculptor, whatever it is — a lot of us are driven by those hurdles that were put in front of us, and why we love to do what we do.”
On her new album, Meaning of Life (out Friday), she clears these hurdles with ease. Her eighth studio release is a mile marker at the end of a whirlwind few years for the 35-year-old, in which she married her talent manager husband, Brandon Blackstock, in 2013, became a stepmom to his two daughters and welcomed two children of her own, daughter River Rose in 2014 and son Remington in 2016.
“I was single for, like, ever,” she says. “But once I found someone I fell in love with — we’ve been together four years (this week) — honestly, it still feels like the first week. We’re just still crazy about each other.”
Meaning of Life chronicles Clarkson’s transformed personal life while also signaling a professional breakthrough. It’s her first release on Atlantic after completing the terms of her post- American Idol RCA contract.
Clarkson has called her RCA contract an “arranged marriage” and addresses those turbulent years on the album’s blistering closer I Don’t Think About You, which she dedicates to “several people that I’ve worked with over the years that really just did not take time to get to know me at all.” Yet, that’s about all the wrath Clarkson exerts on the upbeat Meaning of Life, and she laughs off the idea of making a Lemonade- style album that flames her enemies. In Clarkson’s eyes, why would she waste her hard-earned time on such negativity?
“I like how all these girls have feuds, and like, have novelty songs against each other,” she says. “I don’t know if I’ve ever liked someone that much to dislike them that much.” Instead, Meaning of Life delivers tracks like Whole Lotta Woman, an ode to Texas women that Clarkson declares is her “favorite song in the world to sing live.”
“The two girls I wrote it with, we’re all Southern, and we’re like, thicker Southern,” she says, hinting at the body positivity that has won her fans over the years. “People get afraid of thick girls like there’s a problem with it. Everybody’s ‘happy’ looks different. And everybody, at different stages of life, looks different.”
After Meaning of Life — and her new children’s Christmas book, River Rose and the Magical Christmas, out this week — Clarkson heads to The Voice next spring to sit in the judges’ chairs alongside longtime friends Adam Levine and Blake Shelton.
Of course, The Voice marks a full circle for Clarkson, whose Idol win in 2002 seems lifetimes away. “People all the time come up to me, and the first thing they always say is, ‘ Oh my gosh, I feel like I won with you.’ It’s almost like their journey as well.”