With the benefit of hindsight, it’s possible to see how Kelly Clarkson began charting her present course 15 years ago, undertaking the shift from pop superstar to inescapable lifestyle brand.
This year marks the 15th anniversary of her fourth album, All I Ever Wanted, which followed the contentious release of her third album, 2007’s My December. A fraught project that found Clarkson pivoting from the comparatively breezy pop-rock of her first two records to embrace a darker, edgier style (in both presentation and subject matter), December deeply fractured Clarkson’s relationship with her label, RCA Records — so much so that 16 years later, while promoting her 2023 album Chemistry, she was still exchanging barbs in the press with former label head Clive Davis.
Given that Sturm und Drang, it was little surprise Wanted swung the pendulum back in the direction of easy, sunny and accessible. Wanted debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart and spun off three hit singles, not least of which was the chart-topping (and certifiable banger) “My Life Would Suck Without You.”
While Clarkson hasn’t really deviated much from the glossy pop playbook in the intervening years, Wanted was the first instance of the Burleson native giving the mainstream what it wanted — but on her terms.
That ironclad insistence on meeting the audience in a manner of her own choosing has allowed her to expand her footprint well beyond pop music, incorporating a regular network television presence (via her eponymous daily talk show and The Voice), as well as becoming a familiar face in advertisements for brands like Wayfair.
Released on March 6, 2009, All I Ever Wanted eventually sold over a million copies in the U.S. and earned Clarkson a Grammy nomination for best pop vocal album. She aligned herself with multiple A-list producers, including Max Martin, Dr. Luke, Howard Benson and Ryan Tedder, all of whom knew how to maximize Clarkson’s strengths as an artist and preserve her unique approach.
The sonic sensibility on display throughout Wanted skews guitar- and drum-heavy, filtered through major label glossiness — Clarkson’s vocal work, always impeccable and impressive, scales new heights here, particularly on “My Life Would Suck Without You,” which has the Texan nailing multiple octave leaps with ease.
“Already Gone,” its uncanny stylistic similarities to Beyonce’s “Halo” notwithstanding, also gave Clarkson, one of popular music’s all-time great balladeers, an immaculate, tear-stained close-up. It’s one of the more moving pop tracks of the mid-aughts — the way Clarkson’s voice breaks and catches just so on the line “I love you enough to let you go” never fails to induce goosebumps.
Lyrically, she doesn’t shy away from the messiness of relationships — the one true throughline of Clarkson’s entire output to date, up to and including her most recent release, Chemistry, which sifts through the ashes of her marriage to Brandon Blackstock — and offers up plenty of memorable lines (“I know that I’ve got issues/But you’re pretty messed up too/Either way I found out/I’m nothin’ without you,” Clarkson sings on “My Life Would Suck Without You,” as zippy an ode to toxic co-dependence as you’ll find).
Critics believed Wanted recovered Clarkson’s footing as a pop star of consequence: “All I Ever Wanted is a masterful rapprochement with the mainstream, full of cheerfully ear-snagging tunes, inventive production, exhilarating vocals, and enough inherent Kelly-ness to put aside fears that her label bosses implanted blonde electrodes in her brain to make her behave,” said Ann Powers in the Los Angeles Times.
Rolling Stone’s Jody Rosen concurred, to a point: “‘My Life Would Suck Without You’ is a kind of repentance, a chastened pop star’s retreat from auteurdom. It’s also, as it turns out, fantastic — the early favorite for single of the year. It’s hard to match that thunderclap opening, but Clarkson does, for a couple of songs, at least.”
That said, it wasn’t universal raves: “If her first album was the Obligation, her second the Breakthrough and her third the Reaction, then All I Ever Wanted plays out as Ms. Clarkson’s Concession,” observed the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica, in an assessment splitting the difference between praise and dismissal.
The range of critical reaction aside, what’s more troubling upon reflection is how My December was treated less like a choice made by an artist who wanted to explore a different direction than something a petulant pop star just needed to get out of her system. In that way, listeners can feel the bared teeth in Wanted tracks like “I Do Not Hook Up” or “Don’t Let Me Stop You” — she might have let in the sunshine, but the sentiment was unchanged.
The follow-up to Wanted, 2011’s Stronger, seemed to split the difference between sunshine and seething — hits like the anthemic title track “What Doesn’t Kill You (Stronger)” or the luminous “Dark Side” — were less revolutionary than a refinement. In time, Clarkson would deliver her first holiday album (2013’s Wrapped in Red) and continue threading the needle between anguish and uplift (2015’s Piece by Piece; 2017’s Meaning of Life), building a formidable fan base in the process.
That take-it-or-leave-it attitude, which colored My December, but was more channeled into All I Ever Wanted, is the foundation of the now-41-year-old pop star’s career. By dictating the terms of her creative participation in the music business — to the extent such a thing is possible, anyway — Clarkson has enabled herself to grow and change and remain true to herself, avoiding the trap of being locked into a particular sound or style, while also being allowed to not only have a life, but to find creative inspiration in areas beyond music.
Looking back, what can seem a sop to staying put amid the A-listers at the time seems less like copping out than seeing around the curve. Kelly Clarkson has long accommodated pop stardom on no else’s terms but her own, and even the glossiest songs in her catalog sparkle less from sunshine than the glinting reflection from her steely, unshakeable determination to answer to only herself.
Preston Jones
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