Kelly Clarkson and Steve Martin are hooking up -- for a song. Clarkson announced today that she and the Only Murders in the Building star recorded the song "I Hate Love."
The American Idol winner and talk show host releases her Chemistry album on June 23.
She references Martin in the lyrics, singing, "The Notebook lied / It's complicated, it's more like what happened / So you can keep Gosling and I'll take Steve Martin. "
Clarkson is referring to both the tear-jerking 2004 Gosling film The Notebook and the 2009 film It's Complicated featuring Martin as a good-natured architect who finds out he's unwittingly become part of a love triangle. She says the films show a range of relationships from idealistic to messy.
"I love that territory. I love hearing something kind of poppy and then it being either angry or super sad," Clarkson told EW about the song. "I also have to use humor as a healing mechanism, a coping mechanism. I do that all the time. So I was writing a love song and I was just angry. I was like, 'God, why are you still so into something that was so bad?'"The Clarkson/Martin collaboration has a surprising origin. Clarkson told Billboard when she saw Martin, 77, playing banjo online during the pandemic, it inspired her to ask if he'd join her on a song.
"Let's take this lyrical reference a step further and add Martin's banjo to the anti-love song," Clarkson said she told the song's producer Jesse Shatkin. "I was like, 'I know that sounds crazy,' but Shatkin encouraged her to make the request.
Shatkin went to Martin's house to make it happen. "We ultimately went in to do something that could have taken 15 minutes, and we spent a couple hours just kind of jamming on the song," he told Billboard. "He was really, really amazing at banjo but also really, really cared about getting it right."
Clarkson hopes to meet Martin one day and potentially have him as a guest on her eponymous daytime talk show.
Chemistry covers Clarkson's contentious divorce from Brandon Blackstock, the father of her two children. "I Hate Love" is the second single from the album.
