Kelly Clarkson’s Forthcoming Album Is Inspired by Her Divorce

Kelly Clarkson is looking ahead to her first album in five years, and it will be full of songs inspired by her separation and eventual divorce from her ex-husband, Brandon Blackstock. The singer and television host revealed the news to Variety, sharing that the album's songs were written during the emotional, yet abundantly creative time in her life.

Blackstock and Clarkson wed in October of 2013. She filed for divorce in June of 2020. The former couple reached a settlement in their divorce in March of 2022.

“When my ex and I first separated, there were many emotions. It was hard,” Clarkson shares. “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."

Since her 2017 album, Meaning of Life, Clarkson has released a Christmas album and a compilation of her "Kellyoke" covers from her talk show, and she says those lighter releases were somewhat purposeful as she continued processing her divorce.

"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," she continues. "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 adds that the new album is set to come out in 2023, and it will cover a wide range of the emotions she experienced during the past couple of years.

"There’s everything on the album," she says. "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."

The American Song Contest host says she wasn't sure if she would release the vulnerable album, but she wants to be a sounding board for people who may be going through a similar situation. She is also planning a future tour — which she says will be "therapeutic" — where fans who relate to the music can "scream at the top of their lungs."

"I’m through it now, but there is somebody else who is in it, and that’s a hard place to be, especially if you feel alone," says Clarkson. "It’s a hard thing to describe, it’s a hard thing to go through publicly, it’s hard with kids. This record, I think I wrote this for a reason — not just for me, but maybe someone else can benefit from it."

The album's title and official release date have not yet been announced. Clarkson has treated fans to new music recently, however, with the release of a new version of "9 to 5" that dropped on Sept. 9. She joined Dolly Parton for the new version of the iconic song, which appears in the new documentary, Still Working 9 to 5.