Divorce Changes Kelly Clarkson Song

Singer said she hadn't planned to perform 'Piece by Piece' again
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 7, 2023 7:05 PM CDT
Kelly Clarkson Renews Song With Post-Divorce Lyrics
Kelly Clarkson and her husband, Brandon Blackstock, attend the Grammy Awards in New York in 2018.   (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

In 2015, Kelly Clarkson released a song, "Piece by Piece," in which she tells why Brandon Blackstock is better at being a husband and father than her own father was. "A lot of that song is about what I desired and what I hoped and what I saw in someone," the singer told the Hollywood Reporter. Last year, Clarkson and Blackstock divorced. "And it turns out I might not be singing that song again," Clarkson said in June. Instead, she reimagined the lyrics. Clarkson debuted the reworked "Piece by Piece" on Saturday in Las Vegas, with an explanation.

"This song I initially wrote just super hopeful, right? And well, sometimes hopeful turns into hopeless, so here we go, 'Piece by Piece,'" Clarkson told her audience, per People. In several places, she replaced her ex's pronouns with first-person ones. "But piece by piece, he collected me up" became "But piece by piece, I collected me up," and "He takes care of me/He loves me" was changed to "I take care of me/'cause I love me." Other changes seem to refer to their fight over money when they split.

Clarkson's most recent album, Chemistry, also covers the emotional ground of her divorce. Some of those angry lyrics were written while she was still married. "I was going through some stuff and just really trying to get it out," Clarkson said. Even when it came out earlier this summer, she didn't expect to do "Piece by Piece" onstage again. She changed her mind and decided to sing it "not only for fans, but for that girl that did believe wholeheartedly that that's what was happening, and that's what I saw," she said, per People. Clarkson added: "I know that that's incredibly sad to think about. But, you know, it's real." (More Kelly Clarkson stories.)

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