Kelly Clarkson, the first American Idol who spent two decades taking back the controls

Kelly Clarkson

Photo: Stephen Schester/Carlin Leslie / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 24, 1982 Fort Worth, Texas, United States
Occupation	Singer-songwriter
Known for	Trolls World Tour, The Star, UglyDolls
Awards	3 Grammy · 2 MTV Video Music Award

Kelly Clarkson won the first American Idol and has spent most of the time since trying to get the controls back. Nobody ever doubted the voice, a chest-register belt that moves from gospel runs to country ballads without changing gears. Control was the scarcer thing. Labels picked her singles, a television format picked her image, and a manager took commissions on deals a state regulator later ruled he had no licence to make. She now releases music through a label she owns, has closed the daytime talk show that won her a run of Emmys, and is back in a coach’s chair on The Voice. What remains open is whether the singer can step out from behind the host.

Fort Worth, Texas, is where Kelly Brianne Clarkson was born on April 24, 1982 and grew up with her mother in Burleson, a small town south of the city. In seventh grade a choir teacher, Cynthia Glenn, heard her singing in a school hallway and told her to audition. After Burleson High School she turned down scholarships from the University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Texas and Berklee to chase a record deal instead. Offers did come, from Jive and Interscope, and she refused both. “They would have completely pigeonholed me as a bubblegum act,” she said later. A move to Los Angeles produced a few demos and little else, and after a fire in her apartment she went home to Burleson.

Friends pushed her into the first season of American Idol, which she won in September 2002 with 58 per cent of the vote against Justin Guarini, and RCA signed her on the spot under Clive Davis and Simon Fuller, the show’s creator. Her coronation single, A Moment Like This, jumped from number 52 to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, breaking a leap record held by the Beatles, and became the best-selling single of the year in the United States. The debut album, Thankful, entered the Billboard 200 at number one in 2003. The deal also bound her to From Justin to Kelly, a beach musical with Guarini that she says she made only because she was “contractually obligated”.

The break with that version of herself came on the second record. Clarkson left Fuller’s management, co-wrote six songs and steered Breakaway toward guitars. Since U Been Gone, written by Max Martin and Dr. Luke, became the template for the next decade of pop-rock radio, Behind These Hazel Eyes followed it into the top ten, and Because of You, a ballad she had written at 16 about her parents’ divorce and that RCA had rejected for her debut, topped the European charts. The album sold more than twelve million copies worldwide and won her two Grammys in 2006, for Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

Then she asked for more. For My December she wrote every song, worked with her touring band rather than the hit producers, and replaced Davis as executive producer. He wanted tracks re-recorded for radio; she refused. “I’ve sold more than 15 million records worldwide, and still nobody listens to what I have to say,” she said at the time. The label held back promotion, the tour was cancelled and rebooked on a smaller scale, and she later apologised to Davis. The album still debuted at number two and went platinum. She returned to brighter pop with All I Ever Wanted, whose single My Life Would Suck Without You jumped from number 97 to number one, and with Stronger, whose title song gave her a third Hot 100 number one and made her the first artist to win the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album twice. Piece by Piece, her seventh and last album for RCA, went to number one in 2015.

The second career started on television. Clarkson joined The Voice as a coach in 2018 and won her first season with Brynn Cartelli; with four winners in all, she remains the female coach with the most victories in the show’s history. The Kelly Clarkson Show launched in September 2019 and collected Daytime Emmys year after year. Its signature segment, Kellyoke, had her opening each episode with somebody else’s song, and those covers became the music most people heard from her. A new deal with Atlantic produced the soul-leaning Meaning of Life and Chemistry, a record about the end of her marriage to the talent manager Brandon Blackstock, who had also managed her career.

That is the contradiction in the story she tells about control. The fight over My December was about being heard as a writer, yet the platform that made her most visible for seven years was a talk show where she sang covers every day, and the Atlantic albums, respectable as they were, produced nothing on the scale of Since U Been Gone or Stronger. In May 2023 eleven current and former staffers told Rolling Stone the show was a toxic workplace; they blamed producers rather than her, and Clarkson called it unacceptable and promised leadership training for senior staff, herself included. This month her post accusing a Brooklyn shop, Art of Play, of treating her as if she could not afford a singing-bird automaton drew a reply that the piece was not for sale, then silent security footage aired by the journalist Pablo Torre. The host’s reach cuts both ways.

The personal and the professional came apart in the courts first. Clarkson filed for divorce in 2020, and in November 2023 the California Labor Commissioner ruled that Blackstock had acted as an unlicensed talent agent and ordered him to return more than 2.6 million dollars in commissions. She had legally changed her name to Kelly Brianne the year before, keeping Clarkson only for the stage. In January 2025 she announced High Road Records, her own label, saying “I feel like I’ve earned it”, and released Where Have You Been on it that May, alongside a residency, Studio Sessions, at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Blackstock’s illness forced her to postpone shows that summer; he died of melanoma in August 2025, aged 48.

In February 2026 Clarkson and NBCUniversal announced that The Kelly Clarkson Show would end after its seventh season so she could spend more time with her two children, and the final episode aired on August 31, 2026. She is coaching again on the 30th season of The Voice, which began in September, her eleventh on the panel. The residency came back to Caesars Palace from July 17 to August 15, and on the opening day she released I’d Be Lyin’, a song she wrote with her band members Jason Halbert and Jaco Caraco and has called fun, anthemic and sarcastic.

She has not said whether that single points to an eleventh studio album. If it does, it will be the first album of her career that belongs entirely to her, released without a label to overrule her and without a daily show to sing over it.