Kelly Clarkson took a long time to decide whether to release her “angry” divorce album.
The Since U Been Gone singer filed for divorce from husband Brandon Blackstock in June 2020, with the split finalised in August 2021.
In a new interview for Variety, Kelly revealed that she wrote an array of new songs in the wake of the breakup, but decided to hold onto the music for quite some time.
“The whole divorce thing happened, and I needed to write it. And then I didn’t know if I was going to release it, because you can be very angry in that state of mind,” she reflected. “So some of the songs, they definitely cover the gamut of emotions; there’s everything on the album. It’s almost like the arc of a relationship, because the beginning is so beautiful and so sweet, and then it evolves. And sometimes it doesn’t evolve how you want.”
Kelly plans to drop the album next year. Her last major record was 2017’s Meaning of Life, though she also released the festive album When Christmas Comes Around… last year.
“When my ex and I first separated, there were many emotions. It was hard,” the 40-year-old continued. “My producer and I were laughing yesterday because I was like, ‘Remember that time we wrote, like, 25 songs in a week?’ A lot of those are the ones that are on the album. I literally wrote most of these almost two years ago. Then I told my label, ‘I can’t talk about this until I’ve gone through it,’ and it’s just taken some time to do that. That’s one of the reasons we’ve done a lot of Christmas stuff the past two years – because I was like, ‘Well, that’s happy!'”
Meanwhile, season four of the mother-of-two’s daytime programme, The Kelly Clarkson Show, is set to premiere in the U.S. on 12 September.