Since he's been gone, Kelly Clarkson can breathe new music for the first time.
But as she recently revealed, the processes of recording her new album Chemistry wasn't all that easy.
"I'm more nervous on a personal level with everyone in my world," Kelly said on On-Air With Ryan Seacrest on March 29. "I've always written with a vulnerable heart, so I'm very open. So I'm not nervous about that. I think I'm just more nervous on a personal note because it's one of those things where I'm going to have to keep talking about it and keep performing."
The upcoming album marks her first new music since splitting from husband Brandon Blackstock in 2020 after six years of marriage. (The pair finalized their divorce in March 2022.)
"I was trying to find a word that really described the whole thing because I didn't want everybody to think I was just coming out with some just like, 'I'm angry. I'm sad,'" the Kelly Clarkson Show host revealed. "Just one or two emotions."
She continued, "This album is definitely the arc of an entire relationship. A whole relationship shouldn't be just brought down to one thing. So there's the good, the bad and the ugly kind of thing going on in it."
And even before the album officially took shape, the 40-year-old reflected on what it might look like. As she revealed on Today in Sept. 2020, three months after filing for divorce, Kelly called her next album "probably be the most personal one I've ever released."
She added, "And the whole record is basically every emotion you experience from the beginning of a relationship to the end of what it is now or where it is now, and it's been very therapeutic for me."
Fast forward a few years later and Kelly revealed that the album—which doesn't yet have a release date—contains a lot of the songs she wrote in the wake of her split.
"When my ex and I first separated, there were many emotions. It was hard," she told Variety in Sept. 2022. "My producer and I were laughing yesterday because I was like, 'Remember that time we wrote, like, 25 songs in a week?' A lot of those are the ones that are on the album. I literally wrote most of these almost two years ago. Then I told my label, 'I can't talk about this until I've gone through it,' and it's just taken some time to do that."