Kelly Clarkson Announces Post-Divorce Album ‘Chemistry,’ Explains Meaning Behind the Title
Kelly Clarkson has officially announced the title of her upcoming post-divorce album.
The 40-year-old pop superstar and television personality shared the exciting news through social media on Sunday (March 26), revealing details about the album’s title, Chemistry, and assuring fans that new music will be arriving very soon.
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“I’ve been working on this project for close to three years now. I wasn’t sure I was going to release it, but I am. The album is called Chemistry,” Clarkson said in a video on Instagram.
“I was trying to find a word, it might be one of the songs on the album, but I was trying to find a word that really described the whole thing. I didn’t want everybody to think I was just coming out with some ‘I’m angry,’ ‘I’m sad’ — just one or two emotions. This album is definitely the arc of an entire relationship.”
The Kelly Clarkson Show host added, “That whole relationship shouldn’t be brought down to one thing. There’s the good, the bad and the ugly kind of thing going on. Chemistry can be a really amazing, sexy, cool, fun thing, but it can also be very bad for you. So that’s why I named it Chemistry, I thought it was the perfect title to describe the entire album.”
Clarkson did not reveal a specific release date for Chemistry, but said the album is “coming out soon” and noted that new music from the forthcoming release is “coming out even sooner.”
The songstress said in a September 2022 interview with Variety that she had been working on new music in the wake of her separation and subsequent divorce filing from ex-husband Brandon Blackstock in 2020.
“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,” Clarkson told Variety. “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!’”
Clarkson’s most recent album, the holiday release When Christmas Comes Around, arrived in 2021. Prior to that, she dropped her eighth studio album, 2017’s Meaning of Life, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.
The singer’s upcoming Chemistry album was reportedly inspired by the “emotional journey” she went through during her tumultuous split with Blackstone, with whom she has two young children.
“I hadn’t really been working hardcore on an album until I needed to. I was just very busy,” Clarkson said of the album, which will be released on Atlantic Records.
“There were so many jobs, and I’m a single mom — well, even with being married, it’s a lot, trying to fit kids’ schedules in and all that stuff. But then 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. 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.”
Watch Clarkson’s Chemistry album announcement on Instagram below.
Mitchell Peters
Billboard
