Despite their divorce drama, Kelly Clarkson briefly spoke to ex-husband Brandon Blackstock about her new album, Chemistry.
“We did have a little text exchange about it,” the inaugural American Idol champion, 41, said on Thursday, June 22, while appearing on the Today show. “I don’t even remember why or how it happened, but I was like, ‘Hey, I didn’t just diminish us down to one (thing).’ You know what I’m saying? It’s all in there, the ride. The beauty is in there, as well. Now, there’s a lot of pain, but that’s what happens, for all of us.”
Clarkson and Blackstock, 46, were married for nearly seven years before the “Stronger” singer filed for divorce from the music manager in June 2020. The pair got into a heated legal battle over dividing their assets and who would get custody of their two minor children: River Rose, 9, and Remington, 7. After two years of a constant back and forth, their split was finalized in March 2022.
The Kelly Clarkson Show host was awarded primary custody of their kids, while Blackstock — who also has two older children from his previous marriage to Melissa Ashworth — received monthly visitations. She also agreed to pay her former spouse a one-time sum of $1.3 million and $115,00 per month in spousal support until January 2024.
In addition to Clarkson’s legal woes with her ex, she has also been involved in a three-year legal battle with her former father-in-law, Narvel Blackstock. Brandon’s father and his talent agency, Starstruck Management Group, sued Clarkson for breach of contract and unpaid commissions. The “Miss Independent” songstress was represented by the group from 2007 to 2020.
Her former father-in-law claimed Clarkson owed them $1.4 million in unpaid commission for her work on The Voice and her talk show, The Kelly Clarkson Show. Clarkson countersued him for the allegations, and their legal battle is set to conclude later this month.
While Clarkson appeared to remain strong in the public eye during her messy breakup, she confessed that wasn’t the case behind closed doors.
“Just to be brutally honest, I did not handle it well. I had many sessions with just my friends [where] I couldn’t even speak,” she admitted to Zane Lowe during a Wednesday, June 21, interview on Apple Music 1. “I was crying so hard, even before separating. There were just a lot of now unhealthy habits you recognize or habits that you recognize that you didn’t see before. Hindsight is a lot easier.”
As she worked through her heartbreak, Clarkson channeled her emotions — and reflected on the good times — on her 10th studio album, which dropped on Friday, June 23.
“I didn’t want everybody to think I was just coming out with some ‘I’m angry,’ ‘I’m sad’ [record] — just one or two emotions. This album is definitely the arc of an entire relationship. That whole relationship shouldn’t be brought down to one thing,” she wrote via Instagram in March 2023 while announcing the name of the album. “There’s the good, the bad and the ugly kind of thing going on. Chemistry can be a really amazing, sexy, cool, fun thing, but it can also be very bad for you. So that’s why I named it Chemistry, I thought it was the perfect title to describe the entire album.”
