It was an about-face made that much more humiliating by how public it was. After the commercial failure of Kelly Clarkson’s 2007 labor of love, My December, a sober record that arrived with a loud vote of no confidence from Clarkson’s label, RCA, the singer returned this year with a frilly, by-the-numbers pop album, All I Ever Wanted.
So is Kelly Clarkson the Barton Fink of pop music, contractually obligated to crank out fluff when her heart yearns to create serious art?
That’s a narrative Clarkson herself seems to embrace, judging from her nervous between-song banter at her concert Friday night at the Milwaukee Theatre. With surprising candor, Clarkson spoke of forcing herself to write happy songs when she gravitates toward sad ones, recalled her struggles convincing her label to push her stoic ballad “Because of You” as a single, and hinted at reservations over her pluckier singles, ceding she much prefers her less direct album cuts.
In fact, she explained, she sometimes grows tired of playing her own songs in general, which is why she filled this tour with so many cover songs. She fused the minor Alanis Morissette single “That I Would Be Good” with the major Kings of Leon hit “Use Somebody,” sang Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight,” and led her 11-piece band through a large-scale production of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army,” a song selection that might have been even more shocking had she not done a Black Keys cover earlier (“Lies”).
She sang each beautifully, hitting remarkable notes as casually as she hit the easy ones, with none of the showboating of typical pop singers. But between the many covers and her own grabbag songbook, all her genre-hopping made for a manic show. Loath as she may be to acknowledge it, she is truly a product of “American Idol,” and she performs each song as if it’s been plucked from a different theme week. Over the course of the night, Clarkson was a Joan Jett-styled rocker, a feisty dance-pop diva, a chirpy retro-soul singer, a brassy blues belter, a coffee-shop singer-songwriter, an old-fashioned country gal and a White Stripe. Clarkson wants to break free from her label’s chains and establish herself as an artist with her own voice. What that voice will be, though, she hasn’t decided yet.
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