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Kelly Clarkson is the latest member of Spotify‘s Billions Club. “Since U Been Gone,” a single from her 2004 album Breakaway, has become her first release to reach one billion streams on the digital streaming platform.
Earlier this year, Rolling Stone named “Since U Been Gone” the 31st greatest song of the 21st century, describing the record as “a song that quickly became both an enormous hit and (perhaps because of the sound it was aping) a universal critics’ darling. From the very first line, Clarkson makes the song her own; she later recounted having to argue with her collaborators about her desire to jump an octave for the chorus. But even if the song represented, for Clarkson, a fraught experience with A-list songwriters, it remains a masterful slice of early-aughts indie-pop cross contamination.”
Clarkson crafted “Since U Been Gone” with songwriters Max Martin and Dr. Luke, who were inspired by early-aughts alt-rock like Yeah Yeah Yeahs. “It was a lot of trust in the label because I didn’t know Dr. Luke or Max. And it worked out,” she told Rolling Stone in 2015. “We ended up getting together in Sweden and they got to know me as an artist and we amped up the track and made it a little more rockin’. But they didn’t know I was going to go an octave above on the chorus.”
In an interview with Di Weekend published in 2016, Martin credited the record with helping him find his way back after pop underwent a complete overhaul in the wake of his lucrative boy band boom.
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”I’ve learned that things change. The whole boy band thing almost turned into a stock market crash. Then, there was a period when we thought that Pharrell (Williams) and the others came and ruined it all for us with their super cool beats,” Martin said at the time. “My first thought was: people are idiots for not understanding how great our stuff really is. Then, in the end, I realized: the world has moved on, we’re the ones who’re stuck in one place. So I started listening to other kinds of music. I spent a lot of time in New York and worked with artists who never really got anywhere. Then things took a new turn with ‘Since U Been Gone.’”
Clarkson’s memory of the record is more complicated. “Behind the scenes, it was not so fun to record because of situations I won’t talk about, because I won’t sell people out,” she told Apple Music in 2020. But I will say, my favorite memory, if I’m being more positive about it, was the fact that I got to show up to a video shoot and completely trash an apartment, and that was my job. That video was possibly one of my favorite videos ever to make, because literally I just got to just have rage, and just break stuff all day long.”
Clarkson earned her first Grammy Awards win when “Since U Been Gone” took home Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 2006. She won Best Pop Vocal Album for Breakaway that same year.
The singer’s Spotify stats show three more releases nearing the one-billion mark, with “Underneath the Tree,” “Because of You,” and “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” each sitting at more than 805 million streams.
