Kelly Clarkson called into The Tonight Show: At Home Edition on Thursday (April 17) to dish about her new single “I Dare You.”
The hopeful ballad isn’t a typical single for the superstar, who recorded the track as a duet in five other languages with artists including Faouzia (Arabic), Zaz (French), Maya Buskila (Hebrew), Blas Cantó (Spanish) and Glasperlenspiel (German). According to Clarkson, the idea for the multi-language single was sparked by her pre-American Idol days as an opera singer.
“I grew up singing opera, and I got to sing in French and Italian, the Latin-based languages,” she told host Jimmy Fallon. “I mean, when you’re a kid you want to sing Whitney Houston, right? So it wasn’t like I was like, ‘Yeah opera!’ But now I think it’s beautiful, and I thought it’d be cool one day if in my career, there was a song that kind of lent itself to that.”
Clarkson also revealed that, while the track is an ideal soundtrack for the current pandemic happening around the globe, she’s actually been working on the project for more than a year, and ended up recorded all six versions of the song in just four days.
“It’s basically, ‘I dare you to love instead of fear,'” she said of the meaning behind the lyrics. “Especially I feel like, we’re in a world where — I mean this song, ironically is very fitting right now — but before pandemic times, it’s no secret as a nation we’re super divided. As a world, we’re getting even more divided and it’s so funny ’cause we’re so technologically advanced. Like you think it would be the opposite, that we’d be more about connection but…I thought the song would be cool to do in that sense. And then all this happened.”
Check out more from Clarkson’s interview, including a story about a touching moment between her and the late Aretha Franklin, below.
