It’s been over a year since Kelly Clarkson’s divorce from Brandon Blackstock was finalized, and three years since she initially filed to end their marriage. However, the talk show host is neck-deep in exploring the highs, the lows and the lessons of it all, as she prepares to release her new album Chemistry. The American Idol alum’s 10th studio album is set to be released June 23, and she recently sat down to discuss the relationship that inspired its music, speaking candidly about how “limiting” her marriage was and what kept her in it for so long.
Kelly Clarkson appeared on Glennon Doyle’s We Can Do Hard Things podcast, and not surprisingly, the singer’s seven-year marriage to Brandon Blackstock was a big part of the conversation. Being a year removed from the divorce — as well as writing a crazy amount of music about it — has given her perspective on what she went through, and she told the author that she can see now how the relationship she was in was not the right one for her. Clarkson said:
I felt limited. Yes. And I don’t feel like that’s necessarily the truth for all marriage. I just think that was for in my case, I just felt limited. But if you’re on the same path at the same time, and you’re actually working together and every day communicating together and doing the work, I think that it could be beautiful, but for me it wasn’t that and it was very limiting.
That wasn’t something the former coach of The Voice was able to see, however, when she was in the thick of it, and when asked why she stayed so long in that situation, Kelly Clarkson replied:
I think also our ego — or mine — my ego, I’m like, ‘I can do this. I can handle so much.’ My ego is like, ‘I can control my actions, I can control my reactions, I can do this and I can reach this person, and I can get through.’ And it becomes a little bit of your ego that gets in the way.
Kelly Clarkson shares two children with Brandon Blackstock, and she said their well-being played a big part in her trying to make her marriage work. They were also on her mind when choosing the music for Chemistry, as she had to decide which divorce songs went too far and might be inappropriate for her children to hear.
She knows she made the right decision by them, however, and that wasn’t even entirely clear to her until she was out of the relationship, she said. Kelly Clarkson said she hadn’t even realized how much she had “belittled” who she was to try to make everybody else OK. When it was suggested that she had dimmed her light, Clarkson clarified:
I allowed that to happen… because by no means am I a victim in that. You allow someone to do that. You maybe don’t notice you’re doing it. And like you said, it’s imperceptible, it’s gradual, and you don’t even realize what’s happening because it happened so gradually.
This is supposedly the kind of journey fans will take when Chemistry is released, because despite the long and contentious divorce, the album is about more than just the heartbreak. The record will reportedly take listeners on the entire arc of a relationship and even features Steve Martin on the banjo for the breakup anthem “i hate love.”
Chemistry’s release date is coming up quick on June 23, and you can also keep your eye on the 2023 TV schedule to see when The Kelly Clarkson Show will return for its new season, post-writer’s strike, of course.
