Pop Shop
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Taylor Swift goes back to December all the time, and the Billboard Pop Shop Podcast crew goes back to The Eras Tour all the time — or at least twice. On the latest episode, Katie & Keith talk all about hitting SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., for Night 4 of Swift’s epic Eras Tour, just […]
It’s the first day of August, which has us thinking about Taylor Swift’s timely song “August” from her 2020 album Folklore. Folklore was surprise-released on July 24, 2020 — so just ahead of August that year — and in the Augusts since, we’ve seen the song re-emerge on various Billboard charts timed to the month. […]
Since the end of the 13-year conservatorship that controlled her personal and professional lives, Britney Spears has released two new songs: her “Hold Me Closer” duet with Elton John last year and, on Friday, “Mind Your Business” with will.i.am. On the latest Billboard Pop Shop Podcast, Katie & Keith are talking about the new (or […]
Morgan Wallen‘s “Last Night” is currently spending its 14th week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — but does it have a shot at the 19-week record currently held by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus? On the new Billboard Pop Shop Podcast, we’re talking about the seemingly unstoppable […]
We always knew Taylor Swift was a mastermind, but she really outdid herself with the music video for her Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) “From the Vault” track “I Can See You.” Late Friday, Swift surprised Eras Tour concertgoers in Kansas City when she was joined onstage by the top-secret cast from the new visual: 2011 […]
It had been more than two years since we’d heard new music from Olivia Rodrigo, but that all changed first thing Friday when she released “Vampire,” the lead single from her Sept. 8-scheduled sophomore album GUTS. In a tight, under-four-minute package, the melodramatic new song transitions from a “Drivers License”-style piano ballad to a My […]
On Kelly Clarkson’s just-released 10th studio album Chemistry, the song “Rock Hudson” tells the tale of a silver-screen love story that turned out to be all Hollywood smoke and mirrors. The first line of the song: “You were my Rock Hudson/ It was real but it wasn’t.”
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“I thought I found my Rock Hudson,” Clarkson tells Billboard‘s Pop Shop Podcast about her eight-year marriage to Brandon Blackstock that ended in a 2021 divorce. (Clarkson’s full podcast interview will air on Tuesday’s Pop Shop episode next week.) “I never thought that even existed, if I’m being honest with you. I thought that was total bullsh–. So I didn’t even think that was real.”
Clarkson says Hudson — an Academy Award-nominated actor who was one of the most popular leading men of the late ’50s — became her “movie guy” after watching him opposite Doris Day in the 1959 romantic comedy Pillow Talk when she was a kid. “I fell in love with him.”
As she re-examined her ill-fated marriage for the new album, Clarkson realized that the early days “kind of played out like a movie. Like how we met, how we ended up together, things we had in common — like childhood things. We grew up in the same town and didn’t know each other … it just felt like a movie. And it felt too good to be true — which, OK, it was, but that was the reference.”
What she wasn’t expecting after co-writing “Rock Hudson” with producer Jesse Shatkin was that the song could be interpreted another way: While Hudson portrayed a dashing ladies’ man onscreen, the actor was privately a gay man who kept his sexuality under wraps to maintain his Hollywood career, even marrying his agent’s secretary in the ’50s to keep up the illusion. He died of AIDS in 1985 at age 59.
Clarkson says that piece of Hudson’s identity didn’t inspire the song.
“That can be misleading,” Clarkson tells Billboard. “It’s not referencing Rock’s life, like his personal life and what he was, unfortunately, having to hide from the public. … My producer [Shatkin] didn’t have a clue about [Hudson’s] story at all, and I wasn’t even thinking about that. And it was funny, because somebody at the label [Atlantic Records], I think, is the first person who was like, ‘So, Kelly…’ I was like, ‘Oh no!’ It’s just about having that movie life that people think that you have that’s so perfect, and it’s not [perfect] behind closed doors.”
Elsewhere on “Rock Hudson,” Clarkson references her 2016 Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hit “Piece by Piece,” an emotional song she wrote in tribute to her then-husband Blackstock. “By the way, piece by piece, I found out my hero’s me,” Clarkson confidently sings on the new song.
Listen to “Rock Hudson” below, and hear Clarkson’s full interview with Billboard‘s Pop Shop Podcast on Tuesday, June 27.
–Additional reporting by Keith Caulfield
Thanks to The Weeknd’s new song “Popular,” Madonna is back where she’s been many times before: on the Billboard Hot 100. “Popular” (also featuring Playboi Carti) from the new HBO series The Idol lands at No. 43 on this week’s Hot 100 — Madonna’s highest-charting song in more than a decade, since “Give Me All […]
Olivia Rodrigo had one of the splashiest arrivals in recent pop history, with her eight-week Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “Drivers License” and her five-week Billboard 200 No. 1 album Sour culminating in her best new artist win at the 2022 Grammys. We haven’t heard any new music from Rodrigo since she released her blockbuster debut […]
Three hours or bust! On their ambitious new tours, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are setting the bar impossibly high for treks to come, playing three-hour (or longer!) concerts that each cover more than 3 dozen songs from their respective catalogs. Rock fans have come to expect marathon concerts from the likes of Bruce Springsteen or […]