Songoftheday 3/6/24 - So by keeping her heart protected, she'd never ever feel rejected...

 

 

"Miss Independent" - Kelly Clarkson

from the album Thankful (2003)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #9 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 17

 

Today's song comes from Kelly Clarkson, who had won the first season of the TV singing competition show American Idol in the fall of 2002. Her "winner's song", "A Moment Like This", became a hugely-successful single, selling over a million copies (between physical and digital forms). Kelly was hooked up with music business mogul Clive Davis, who oversaw putting together her debut album Thankful. For the next single, producer Rhett Lawrence took a track he had been working on for a while, at first intending for Destiny's Child to record it. When Rhett worked on Christina Aguilera's album Stripped, he fleshed it out a little with her and Matt Morris, but the result never made the cut. 

Eventually Lawrence again reworked the song with Clarkson (supposedly without her knowledge of Aguilera's involvement) to the finished version that's on the album. The lyrics lay out the plot of a young woman who's so guarded to protect herself from hurt, but yet let's that go when finding this one guy. I certainly hope that guy doesn't break her heart (which happens all too much), but she seems to be willing enough to take that chance. The production is sort of dated to the time, but her vocals (as have been proven time and time again) are what shine here. It's quite obvious from the phrasing in the chorus that this was a Xtina song, but Kelly has enough power to at least put in a respectable fire to the delivery. As for the music video, that period of the late 90s/early 2000s which loved to assemble models to randomly mack on each other is quite cringe, and I hope we never go back to that period...

"Miss Independent" proved that Kelly can move past the Idol winner's novelty, reaching the top ten on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in July of 2003. On the radio, the song was even bigger, spending six weeks at #1 on Billboard's Mainstream Top-40 airplay chart, and peaked at #14 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 list and #28 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") format, and even got to #11 on the brand-new Dance Airplay chart. Internationally, the single reached the top ten in Australia (#3) and the United Kingdom (#6), and made the top-40 in Ireland (#11), Sweden (#25), the Netherlands (#27), and Austria (#39). The Thankful album, which came out in April of that year, came in at #1 on the Billboard 200 sales tally for its first week, spending 50 weeks on the list and going on to sell over two million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2004, "Miss Independent" was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, coincidentally losing to Aguilera for her "Beautiful". 

The next release from Thankful was "Low", an understated Frankenstein of country melody, rock attitude, and robotic production. The song went to #14 on Billboard's Mainstream Top-40 radio chart, but without a physical single release stalled down at #58 on the Hot 100. (It did make the top-40 in Australia and the UK.) A Christmas tie-in with Idol with a cover of "My Grown Up Christmas List" got enough easy-listening airplay to climb to #17 on the Adult Contemporary chart at the close of 2003. Lastly, the Thankful track "The Trouble With Love Is", was featured in the movie Love Actually. The song went to #24 on the Mainstream Top-40 chart, and #31 on the Adult Top-40 format, but only "bubbled under" the Hot 100 at #101 at the start of the following year.

Kelly will be back to the series.

(6/10)

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Kelly came back to American Idol to perform the song...

Next up, a stripped down version for AOL Sessions in 2004...

and lastly, at the iHeart Music Festival in 2023...

Up tomorrow: A problematic coupling of a jingoist and a legend about, well, rogue justice.