Kelly Clarkson, "Since U Been Gone"
Moving on, being free, and singing about it as loud as you can
Century Songs is a deep dive into the songs that have meant the most to me in the 21st Century so far, 2000-present. The songs are not ranked, and I’ll be writing about whichever ones seem right that week. For an overview of the project, click here.
Here’s the thing: I have never watched American Idol. The reality competition show debuted in June 2002 and was immediately a major cultural event, occupying two of the top ten Nielsen ratings spots that year (due to airing on both Tuesdays and Wednesdays). Millions of votes were cast each week to determine who should move on and who should be eliminated, and fans became devout for their preferred would-be idol. Absolutely none of this meant anything to me at the time.
Part of this was probably my age. I was in college (the first time) and dealing with a lot of change and mostly watched a lot of “Nick at Nite,” which at that point was showing mostly Three’s Company and Maude. (Y’know, like all college kids watch.) So contemporary pop music and TV that millions of people were watching was not at the top of my list of things to keep up with. Plus I was never a big pop guy, with some exceptions, and if I’m being honest, powerhouse vocals don’t necessarily do anything for me either. (My musical tastes remain a land of contrasts.)
The eventual winner of that first season of American Idol, Kelly Clarkson, certainly does have powerhouse vocals. Along with Carrie “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night” Underwood, she’s probably the most famous and reliable of the winners, although in some cases the runners up have had bigger careers than the winners, like your Jennifers Hudson and your Chrises Daughtry. But when it came time for Clarkson to truly make her mark on the music industry, she smartly left the edges a little rougher and turned up the instruments to compete with those vocals. The result is her best song by a mile.
Kelly Brianne Clarkson was born about 2 months before me in Forth Worth, TX, and discovered her love of music and singing in high school. As she was recording her first demo, teen pop was the dominant musical currency in America, as Britney and Christina battled it out on the charts and boy band after boy band conquered MTV. Her demos failed to launch her career, but she clearly had talent; if only there was some way for her to prove it.
American Idol gave Clarkson a chance to present herself to the world as a bonafide future star, but one without the gloss and provocative image of much of teen pop at the time. She was served up as an antidote, or at least a corrective, to the flashier pop of the era. As Cat Zhang wrote for Pitchfork, Clarkson was “not overtly sexy, ostentatious, or hip,” and the most interesting thing about her is that “she was not interesting at all.” She was just a seemingly ordinary girl who happened to have an extraordinary voice.
Her debut album, Thankful, is mostly lousy, with the gooey leadoff single “A Moment Like This” serving as her coronation and her first Billboard #1. As you can probably guess, I don’t care for it. It’s sweeping and well-produced, and it does exactly what it says on the tin, allowing Clarkson to show off the vocal fireworks that carried her to the top of American Idol. But this kind of pop ballad rarely does anything for me, and if this was the vein in which Clarkson continued, I wouldn’t be writing about her today.
The second single from Thankful, “Miss Independent,” does more to foreshadow the production choices on “Since U Been Gone.” There’s a sort of funky pop-guitar breakdown (courtesy of co-producer Rhett Lawrence, best known for producing Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love,” another vocal powerhouse single I don’t particularly care for) and the drums are programmed a bit more aggressively than you’d expect, but it’s still a pop-forward song that doesn’t especially rock.
Historically, American Idol winners tend to be a bit… dull. With a few aforementioned exceptions, looking through a list of winners and runners up I’ve only even heard of a handful of them. This is what happens when you make decisions by committee, especially if it’s a committee of millions: they’re going to choose the most inoffensive option, the one with the smoothest edges. Thankful may have been successful, but this wasn’t all Clarkson wanted to be.
For her follow-up, 2004’s Breakaway, Clarkson parted ways with her management team and connected with new producers, primarily Swedish Übermensch Max Martin and probable snake-man Dr. Luke, in order to distance herself from the Idol stereotype. Clarkson also insisted on writing more of her own songs, something the label was vehemently against. But her determination won out — she wound up with writing credits on half the album’s songs, including the heartbreaking personal ballad “Because of You,” a song about how her father walked out on her family when she was young and the toll that took on her over the years. It’s a cathartic listen, and it certainly has more drama and stakes than anything on Thankful.
Clarkson did not write “Since U Been Gone,” Martin and Dr. Luke did, but she was instrumental in shaping what the song would ultimately become. The original demo from the producers was, according to Clarkson, “very contrived, very pop,” which was the antithesis of where she wanted Breakaway to go. The track needed to be bigger, harder: louder drums, louder guitars, something more brash and bombastic. (She was so clearly speaking my language.)
The story goes that Martin heard the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ indie classic “Maps”* and was baffled by the decision to keep the chorus quieter when you might expect it to go big and loud. (And some of us might say that’s kind of the entire point and what part of what makes “Maps” great, but more on that another day.) So when it came time to record “Since U Been Gone,” they did exactly the opposite: when the chorus hits, everything is cranked up to 11.
*I won’t embed “Maps” here because it’s going to have to get its own writeup one day. Instead, you can check out nice guy indie rocker Ted Leo’s acoustic mini-mashup that went semi-viral back in the early internet days.
You know the song, and if by some chance you don’t happen to know it, you certainly know songs like it. “Since U Been Gone” is a “good riddance” breakup song, one about shaking off the dregs of a bad relationship and reclaiming your independence in the spirit of songs like “I Will Survive,” “You Oughta Know,” and “Irreplaceable.” The emphatic, celebratory spirit of the lyrics is well served by that huge, shout-along chorus. But before we can get there, Clarkson sets the scene.
“Here’s the thing, we started out friends
It was cool, but it was all pretend
Yeah, yeah
Since you been gone
You’re dedicated, you took the time
Wasn’t long ’til I called you mine
Yeah, yeah
Since you been gone”
It starts out well: friends who become more than friends, a well-traveled road. There’s nothing much here to suggest a problem, which is generally how it starts. Clarkson is in love: “And all you’d ever hear me say / Is how I picture me with you.” It would be sweet if we all didn’t know better. But then, we arrive at the chorus. (All together now!)
“But since you been gone
I can breathe for the first time
I’m so moving on, yeah, yeah
Thanks to you
Now I get what I want
Since you been gone”
In the Pitchfork piece I linked to earlier, Zhang writes that the chorus includes “a cleverly sad sleight-of-hand in the lyrics that suggests one of the worst casualties of a break up is the pity you receive from other people.” I’m not sure if I agree with that, because there’s nothing else in the song that points to the opinions or attitudes of other people. We don’t know what their friends or family think about the breakup, but we do know how Clarkson herself feels about it: a palpable, jubilant sense of relief.
I take the lyric “Now I get what I want” more generally: when she was in the relationship, she was compromising herself in ways she maybe didn’t even realize at the time. Now she’s free, and there’s no one in the way of her getting whatever she wants, whenever she wants it. When she calls back to the “I just picture me with you” line, it’s an acknowledgment of how one-sided the whole thing apparently was:
“How come I’d never hear you say, ‘I just wanna be with you?’
Guess you never felt that way.”
To me, this is the song’s true epiphany, the light bulb moment. You never felt about me the way I felt about you, and I can finally see that. And that’s the moment you become truly free to walk away. It might have hurt before, but there isn’t a whole lot of hurt in the song now, just anthemic, celebratory rock & roll (which also happens to be the best kind of rock & roll).
Over the now 20(!) years since the song was released, “Since U Been Gone” has become all but canonized. It’s a karaoke staple, and probably will be for another 20 years. In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked it at #482 on their list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”; 11 years later, it jumped to #93. Back at Pitchfork, they called it the #21 best song of the 2000s, praising “Clarkson’s go-for-broke performance, those reality show-honed pipes finally put to expressing the unfiltered joy of newfound freedom.” No question it’s her most celebrated moment, and with good reason.
After Breakaway, Clarkson had success with songs like “My Life Would Suck Without You” and “Stronger,” plus a daytime variety/talk show and a celebrated Christmas album. For me, none of these things resonate but it’s clear she remains a household name and should be for a long time. Her incredible vocal skills brought her from obscurity to international acclaim, but her understanding of how to work a damn good song is something that can’t be underestimated.
Next week: A spaghetti Western space-rock mini-opera that’s every bit as dumb as it is brilliant