Kelly Clarkson Explains Why Post-Divorce Lyric Swaps Gave Her 'Perspective'
Kelly Clarkson Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesKelly Clarkson was struggling to sing her romantic ballads when she was going through her divorce from Brandon Blackstock. “Look, I was finding a hard time singing [‘Piece by Piece’], like, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to really sing about that?’” Clarkson, 41, said during the Friday, October 13, episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “I was at a very different place when I wrote it.” Clarkson released “Piece by Piece” in 2015, which was inspired by her relationship with Blackstock, now 46, in comparison to her own absentee father. “But piece by piece, he collected me up / Off the ground, where you abandoned things, yeah,” she sang on the song. “Piece by piece, he filled the holes that you burned in me / At six years old and you know.” She added in another verse: “He never walks away / He never asks for money / He takes care of me / He loves me.” Related: Kelly Clarkson’s Most Savage Lyric Swaps After Brand
Kelly Clarkson was struggling to sing her romantic ballads when she was going through her divorce from Brandon Blackstock.
“Look, I was finding a hard time singing [‘Piece by Piece’], like, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to really sing about that?’” Clarkson, 41, said during the Friday, October 13, episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “I was at a very different place when I wrote it.”
Clarkson released “Piece by Piece” in 2015, which was inspired by her relationship with Blackstock, now 46, in comparison to her own absentee father. “But piece by piece, he collected me up / Off the ground, where you abandoned things, yeah,” she sang on the song. “Piece by piece, he filled the holes that you burned in me / At six years old and you know.”
She added in another verse: “He never walks away / He never asks for money / He takes care of me / He loves me.”
During Clarkson’s August 5 concert in Las Vegas, she tweaked the lyrics. “I just walk away / when they ask for money / I take care of me / ’cause I love me,” she sang during the Sin City gig, swapping “he” for “I.”
Clarkson explained to host Jimmy Fallon that now her fans want her to rerecord her new version of “Piece by Piece.”
“It is very true,” she said after Fallon, 49, called it a “healing version” of the track. “I rewrote it literally an hour before I went on stage in Vegas to sing it because I was like, ‘I can’t sing these lyrics, but I know people want me to sing the song’ and so I changed it right before the show.”
She continued: “It kind of put perspective on me, as well. It was like, ‘That was a lot of pressure to put on someone, you know, to pick up the pieces of something of your past.’ There was a lot going on for me that day, but it ended up working out.”
Clarkson filed for divorce from Blackstock in June 2020 after seven years of marriage. Amid the legal battle, they fought over assets, including her Montana residence that he lived in and custody of daughter River Rose, 9, and son Remington, 7. The divorce was finalized in March 2022 with Clarkson retaining primary custody of the kids and agreeing to pay Blackstock a one-time sum of $1.3 million and $115,000 per month in spousal support until January 2024.
Throughout the divorce, Clarkson continued to helm her eponymous daytime talk show.
“I’m gonna be real with you, like, those last two seasons [of my talk show], specifically, were very hard behind the scenes,” she said on Friday. “Sometimes you send your representative [to an event] because it’s, like, ‘I can’t show up today. Like, I just have to go through the motions and be a robot.’ Because if I didn’t, I would break down.”
Season 5 of The Kelly Clarkson Show — which premieres on Monday, October 15 — will be filmed in New York City’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza. (Clarkson chose to move to the Big Apple with River Rose and Remy since it was closer to her family.)
“I’m excited about season 5 here in New York because I’m in such a great place [and] my little kids are in such a great place,” she gushed on Friday. “I’m happy, I’m present in interviews. Because I wasn’t [before].”
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