On Kelly Clarkson’s just-released tenth studio album Chemistry, the music “Rock Hudson” tells the story of a silver-screen love story that turned out to be all Hollywood smoke and mirrors. The primary line of the music: “You had been my Rock Hudson/ It was actual nevertheless it wasn’t.”
“I assumed I discovered my Rock Hudson,” Clarkson tells Billboard‘s Pop Store Podcast about her eight-year marriage to Brandon Blackstock that resulted in a 2021 divorce. (Clarkson’s full podcast interview will air on Tuesday’s Pop Store episode subsequent week.) “I by no means thought that even existed, if I’m being sincere with you. I assumed that was whole bullsh–. So I didn’t even assume that was actual.”
Clarkson says Hudson — an Academy Award-nominated actor who was probably the most well-liked main males of the late ’50s — turned her “film man” after watching him reverse Doris Day within the 1959 romantic comedy Pillow Discuss when she was a child. “I fell in love with him.”
As she re-examined her ill-fated marriage for the brand new album, Clarkson realized that the early days “sort of performed out like a film. Like how we met, how we ended up collectively, issues we had in widespread — like childhood issues. We grew up in the identical city and didn’t know one another … it simply felt like a film. And it felt too good to be true — which, OK, it was, however that was the reference.”
What she wasn’t anticipating after co-writing “Rock Hudson” with producer Jesse Shatkin was that the music could possibly be interpreted one other manner: Whereas Hudson portrayed a dashing women’ man onscreen, the actor was privately a homosexual man who stored his sexuality below wraps to take care of his Hollywood profession, even marrying his agent’s secretary within the ’50s to maintain up the phantasm. He died of AIDS in 1985 at age 59.
Clarkson says that piece of Hudson’s id didn’t encourage the music.
“That may be deceptive,” Clarkson tells Billboard. “It’s not referencing Rock’s life, like his private life and what he was, sadly, having to cover from the general public. … My producer [Shatkin] didn’t have a clue about [Hudson’s] story in any respect, and I wasn’t even occupied with that. And it was humorous, as a result of any person on the label [Atlantic Records], I feel, is the primary one that was like, ‘So, Kelly…’ I used to be like, ‘Oh no!’ It’s nearly having that film life that folks assume that you’ve got that’s so excellent, and it’s not [perfect] behind closed doorways.”
Elsewhere on “Rock Hudson,” Clarkson references her 2016 Billboard Sizzling 100 high 10 hit “Piece by Piece,” an emotional music she wrote in tribute to her then-husband Blackstock. “By the best way, piece by piece, I came upon my hero’s me,” Clarkson confidently sings on the brand new music.
Hearken to “Rock Hudson” beneath, and listen to Clarkson’s full interview with Billboard‘s Pop Store Podcast on Tuesday, June 27.
–Extra reporting by Keith Caulfield
