Kelly Clarkson
“MY DECEMBER”
“I make plenty of mistakes,” sings Kelly Clarkson near the end of her third album, “My December.” “Yeah, I’m hard, and life with me is never easy.”
Meant as a confession to a lover, those lines could just as easily describe the last few months of Clarkson’s professional life. The road leading up to “My December” has been a bumpy one, with ugly rumors swirling about its quality.
Now we know: “My December” isn’t a wretched misfire. Taken as a whole, it’s a blistering, unrelenting experience, punctuated by a few genuinely fun pop tracks. Echoes of other angry rock chicks can clearly be heard in Clarkson’s abrasive vocals, with most of the songs climaxing in torrents of rage. It’s far afield from the relatively sedate “Since U Been Gone.”
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From the searing “Hole” to the shattering “Irvine,” Clarkson makes you feel her pain with every note. Although she wanted to make this an edgier record, she might’ve taken a page from the Alanis Morissette playbook: Coat the fury in a pop candy shell to make it go down easier. It might not have made “My December” any less difficult emotionally, but a few well-chosen hooks might have made it easier to enjoy.
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Dissing
Kelly Clarkson’s angry kiss-off track “Never Again,” from her new disc “My December,” was inspired by musician David Hodges, Entertainment Weekly reports. Now Hodges, a former member of the band Evanescence, is firing back. At his Web site, davidhodges.info, a June 2 posting says “‘Just A Little Girl’ … is a rebuttal to a single by a former idol currently on the radio.” Sample lyric: “Go ahead and bat your eyes and lie right to the world/for in everything you are you’re just a little girl/I never meant for you to feel this way/but Decembers were never meant to be our graves.”
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