The headliners, superstars like SZA, Taylor Swift y Olivia Rodrigoreflect an incredible diversity of skills with acclaimed albums that explore every corner of the human experience.
And one of those corners is divorce.
Releases of Kelly Clarkson, Miley Cyrus and Kelsea Ballerini evolve the divorce album in all its complexity. While the music industry has long been obsessed with youth, perhaps there’s something to the fact that these musicians are all women in their 30s and 40s, and consequently possess a kind of self-confidence and emotional maturity.
In a culture that seeks to make people feel relatable, stories of romantic relationships with the weight and wisdom of age feel fresh. If pop stars are teenagers, where are the rest of us? Perhaps the depth of a breakup ballad is felt most acutely when a public split plays out in tabloid headlines, and there’s so much more to lose.
Cyrus’ malleable pop on “Flowers,” one of AP’s picks for the best songs of 2023, is a pep talk turned empowerment hit: the sound of a woman finding herself again after a decade-long relationship that ended in divorce. Cyrus earned five nominations, including album of the year, for “Endless Summer Vacation.”
Then there’s Clarkson’s “Chemistry,” a blockbuster release she describes as a “relationship album” that’s nominated for best pop vocal album.
And in the country categories, a genre that has a long tradition of women singing about divorce and domesticity, Ballerini’s “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” is nominated for best album.
These albums are very different from each other, but they share a similar emotional core: they were written while the artists were dealing with crumbling marriages.
In 2020, Cyrus split from actor Liam Hemsworth and Clarkson ended her marriage to Brandon Blackstock. Two years later, Ballerini and her husband Morgan Evans divorced.
Musically, those endings opened up new realities. Clarkson tried her hand at spunky ballads that expanded her vocal range, Ballerini experimented with pop production, and Cyrus wielded her aged voice like a weapon. Her albums emerged from painful periods when each performer was redefining herself.
Ballerini is part of a long lineage of women in country making music about divorce and heartbreak, running the gamut of tones from revenge to celebration. Marissa R. Moss, author of “Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be” , points out that Loretta Lynn’s groundbreaking 1973 song “Rated X” set the precedent for future performers.
What is interesting, now, are the modern ways in which divorce is articulated in these records.
Ballerini’s album, particularly the song “Penthouse,” challenges stereotypical domestic roles and “demonstrates financial power,” Moss said.
“I bought the house with the fence, enough room for some kids,” Ballerini sings. Later, their house becomes claustrophobic, an allegory for their marriage: “And I thought that would make it all better, and maybe forever wouldn’t feel like the walls closing in.” time would never feel like the walls were closing).
It presents the idea that even when women achieve financial autonomy and change the traditional roles of marriage, they are still not necessarily able to find freedom within their limits.
“With a ‘divorce album’ it’s not the first time I’ve felt that it’s different to be a woman in country music, that’s for sure,” Ballerini told The Associated Press, about gender expectations in her musical specialty.
Men have also written quite a bit about ending marriages, but in the current moment, women are leading the charge. Other artists who have recently written about divorce are Adele, Kacey Musgraves, Shakira and Carly Pearce, another 2024 Grammy nominee.
Ballerini, for her part, understands why people deeply identify with the songs on her album that deal with breakups.
“It’s something that was taboo to talk about, especially from a woman’s perspective, for a long time,” she said. It’s about “giving voice to myself again and validating my own feelings, my own life and my own journey, and hoping that other women feel that too and feel validated.”
People often expect divorce albums to contain exclusively sad songs. While Ballerini, Clarkson and Cyrus exorcise pain on their albums, they also express gratitude. These records are sad and empowering, often both at the same time.
“The feeling that people have is that sad music expresses their own sadness, not the sadness of the artist, you feel that the artist is trying to express your sadness,” said Joshua Knobe, a professor and researcher at Yale.
Knobe led a team of academics whose 2023 study found that listeners are drawn to melancholic music for the same reasons they are drawn to sad conversations: because they seek connection.
Or, as Ballerini said, listeners want to feel validated.
“People like success. “They like to talk to people who are successful,” Knobe continued. “But that’s not what makes people feel a deep connection with another human being.”
If negative emotions register as more complex than positive ones, perhaps that creates more opportunities to connect. Divorce albums often traverse a spectrum of feelings, with songs by Cyrus, Ballerini and Clarkson allowing the listener to experience the breadth of the artists’ love and pain. This is certainly worth mentioning. Maybe from some Grammy.
The 2024 Grammys will air live on February 4 on CBS and Paramount+ in the United States from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
Source: AP
