Talk about taking your power back: Do you remember the Kelly Clarkson song “Piece By Piece” from a few years ago? (2015, to be exact.) The original version of the song—a follow up, if you will, to her 2004 hit “Because of You,” which talks about her feelings after her parents’ divorce—features lyrics praising ex-husband Brandon Blackstock (though not by name) for not making the same mistakes in raising their daughter that Clarkson’s own father did with her. (“But piece by piece, he collected me up off the ground where you abandoned things / Piece by piece he filled the holes that you burned in me at six years old / And you know, he never walks away, he never asks for money / He takes care of me, he loves me / Piece by piece, he restored my faith that a man can be kind and a father could stay.”)
Well, some things have changed since 2015, and Clarkson and Blackstock finalized their contentious divorce last year. Clarkson—who is in the midst of a residency in Las Vegas—took to the stage and debuted some new lyrics to the eight-year-old track, and they’re nothing if not empowering.
“This song I initially wrote just super hopeful, right?” she told the audience Saturday, per People. “And, well, sometimes hopeful turns into hopeless, so here we go.”
The new lyrics shift the power from the love of a man to the love of oneself: The “he” pronouns in the original version were switched to “I,” like, for example, the lyrics “I collected me up” and “I filled the holes,” turning the song from an ode to a partner to an ode to one’s own strength and power.
Clarkson also shifted lyrics in the song’s chorus from “He never walks away, he never asks for money / He takes care of me, he loves me” to “I just walk away when they ask for money / I take care of me, ‘cause I love me.”
The new lyrics, People astutely points out, “seems to point at one of the main points of contention within Blackstock and Clarkson’s divorce—money.” Back in July 2021, Clarkson was ordered by a Los Angeles County judge to give Blackstock $150,000 a month in spousal support, as well as $45,601 monthly in child support. The arrangement amounted to Blackstock receiving $195,601 per month from Clarkson—a staggering $2.4 million per year. Clarkson was also ordered to pay $1.25 million towards Blackstock’s attorney fees and costs for their ongoing divorce, which was finally settled in 2022. A source told People in November 2020 that Blackstock had been looking to walk away with more than double the amount in child support, requesting that his ex pay him $436,000 monthly—$301,000 in spousal support and $135,000 in child support. (Clarkson and Blackstock married in 2013 and parted ways in 2020; they are the parents of two children together, River and Remington.)
“We’re putting the setlist together for Vegas right now,” Clarkson told hosts Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang on the “Las Culturistas” podcast this past June. “I don’t want to sing [“Piece By Piece”] because that was a very hopeful place and a place of projecting what one wishes and what one hopes one didn’t fall prey to again. Here’s where I landed, because I went from hardcore pass to, you know what, for a moment in my life—I was pregnant with my first child and we were in a different place—it was very different. So I’m going to respect that chapter and I’m going to respect what happened there. And what I was feeling there is not lost—I did feel that, and that was real at one point.”
Clarkson said that she planned to perform the song during her Vegas residency “not only for fans, but for that girl that did believe wholeheartedly that that’s what was happening, and that’s what I saw,” she said. “I know that’s incredibly sad to think about. But, you know, it’s real.”
