'Idol' winner proves she's here to stay

The Baltimore Sun

LOS ANGELES -- From what mix of elements does a millennial pop star spring? Consider two imaginary home movies from the adolescence of Kelly Clarkson, blockbuster hit-maker and television Idol.

In the first, Clarkson is in her house in Burleson, Texas. There's been a scene at the dinner table. She retreats to her bedroom, crawls onto her bed, puts on headphones and listens to a singer whose voice she describes as "your mother telling you a story." It's Reba McEntire.

"Any time there were hard times at my house, for some reason Reba's voice always made me feel peaceful," remembered Clarkson, who recently fulfilled a dream by collaborating with the country music doyenne. "It's just that voice you want to hear when you're just, like, 'Everything else go away.' I felt the same way about Aretha Franklin - she's my other safe place."

In the second scene, Clarkson has sneaked out of the house with her friends and headed to a club a couple of towns over. Inside, noise penetrates the floorboards. As Todd Lewis, the singer for the Toadies - the best post-grunge band in Texas - yowls and testifies, Clarkson finds herself lifted by the crowd.

"The Toadies - my favorite band of all time!" said the 25-year-old, who has the bouncy but controlled carriage of someone who studied gymnastics. "I've gone to about a billion shows of theirs," she said. "Todd Lewis' voice, I just love that it's sexy, dirty, drunk, broken. Anything about rock swagger, I learned from them. And yeah, I crowd-surfed."

Listening to Clarkson's third album, My December, to be released this summer, it's easy to believe that she has spent time in a mosh pit. It was produced by David Kahne, who has guided new-wave rockers from the Bangles to Sugar Ray to the Strokes, and written almost entirely by Clarkson with several members of her touring band. The album features revered punk bassist Mike Watt on several tracks and stresses Clarkson's avenging-angel vocals throughout. The up-tempo songs, with unpretty titles such as "Hole" and "Judas," spruce up the pop-metal template with sharp guitar riffs and the occasional electro-clash beat. It's not rock, says Clarkson: "Rock, to me, is like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith." But it is hard and, in its own way, extreme.

She's versatile

On My December, Clarkson presents herself as a hot young inheritor of the arena rock stage; next time, she might go country-blues. Versatility is her gift. During an interview at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons in April, Clarkson described her latest effort as a step in a continuing process.

"I'll always come out with a different record," she explained. The songs she's writing for the next album are more down-home and dirty. "But I don't necessarily want to make just a country record," she said. "I'd rather do something like the Rolling Stones - tie in everything."

Clarkson has her own ideas about how to grow. She has plunged into songwriting, hunkered down with her touring band and come up with a sound that mixes the grand gestures of 1980s metal (there's a famous YouTube clip of Clarkson covering "Sweet Child of Mine" by Guns N' Roses, and she nails it) with the barefaced emotionality of '90s alternative music.

So call Clarkson a rocker, but don't mistake her for the new Metallica. The singer has been citing Pat Benatar, and that's about right. Like the spandex queen of the 1970s-'80s pop era, Clarkson has the moxie to rock without worrying about what anybody else thinks that pose requires. Her gift is for finding the source of vitality in absolutely mainstream, people-pleasing pop, which by its nature breaks stylistic rules in favor of magpie mash-ups, bold appropriations and happy accidents.

Indie-rock nods

Clarkson's previous hits, especially the expertly constructed "Since U Been Gone," have gained her surprising cachet among indie-rock fans. According to Ted Leo, an indie-rock elder statesman whose hard-to-find cover of Clarkson's hit has become a cult classic (and laid bare the song's borrowings from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' punk ballad "Maps"), what's interesting is the artfulness of their larceny.

"The song is great, and Kelly Clarkson sings it fantastically, but one of the things that makes it great is what a cheap trick it is - it was a perfectly cynical amalgamation of everything that was 'hot' and 'edgy' in pop music that year," he commented.

Clarkson doesn't want to stop at just one idea, or just one sound, and this unpretentious sense of privilege greatly benefits her. She doesn't have a home genre tugging at her, as do so many young artists (especially American Idol grads), who long to prove their hip-hop cred or hard-rock virility. And it helps, she says, that she won Idol, because for her, the variety the show demands wasn't a put-on.

"I'm lucky because of the Idol thing," she said, disputing the suggestion that she had tried to distance herself from the show. "People got to see me perform different genres, and see that I like different stuff. People enjoy that - most people don't listen to the same kind of music all the time. That's boring."

Unlike many ingenues, Clarkson never came off as a blank slate; even on her teen-pop-tinged first album, Thankful, she pushed through, projecting a kind of directness (she calls it "blunt") that stood out within the music's predictable flourishes. Her second album, Breakaway, took the evolution further; Clarkson began to act out the role she naturally inhabited, that of a freewheeling regular gal for whom fitting in everywhere isn't a compromise but a crowning achievement.

In the end, it's Clarkson's voice that allows for such freedom. Her technical prowess and relaxed phrasing combine in an approach that's virtuosic without being cold, personal rather than affected. She was classically trained, and early on, she emulated technically savvy songbirds such as Mariah Carey, but those nights in clubs listening to the Toadies' Lewis scream showed her that sometimes an ugly note holds more truth.

"Men have always been emotional singers," she said. "There are only a few select women who have actually carried that off. Like Patsy Cline - she's great. She's not a technical singer. She slides around. Aretha slides around. There are these technical singers in my generation who worry so much; it's pretty, but it's nothing like Bono. At some point, I realized, 'I can be pitchy. I can forget lyrics.' I don't need to worry so much about it because I've hit that emotional depth, which is what attracts fans."

Ann Powers writes for the Los Angeles Times.

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