Kelly Clarkson Says She Gave Up ‘Millions’ in Songwriting Royalties to Show How Much She Dislikes Dr. Luke
Kelly Clarkson has revealed she willingly lost “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” “or millions,” in royalties for refusing to associate herself with Dr. Luke as a co-writer on her 2009 single “My Life Would Suck Without You.”
In a new interview with Z100, the singer said, “I was making a point to the people working with me, going, ‘This is how much I didn’t want to do this.’ I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about, oh, ‘You’re going to be the most famous person ever if you do this.’ That’s not what holds weight in my life.”
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Last year, Clarkson alleged that those who worked at her record label at the time, RCA (owned by parent company Sony), said they would not release her album if she did not work with Dr. Luke.
While she insisted her experience with Dr. Luke is nothing like Kesha’s alleged experience — “He didn’t do anything like that with me,” she said in the Z100 interview, referring to Kesha’s allegations of abuse and her ongoing legal battle against the producer — the former American Idol star is just “not a fan” of him.
“There’s a lot of times in my career where you don’t see my name on the song and that’s because sometimes I don’t write them,” she explained. “A lot of times I do change the song in a way that probably you should ask for credit, but I don’t because the song was already great — I just made it more me. I think a lot of artists steal credit a lot from writers, which I think is super crappy ’cause that’s their livelihood.”
“If I deserve it, I usually ask,” she continued. “And I did deserve it on that song just ’cause I changed it a bit,” she said of “My Life Would Suck Without You,” which went to No. 1.
“Basically, they were gonna sit on my record unless I did what they wanted. I was so frustrated because I literally said, ‘Anyone in the world but this one person. I will work with anyone you want to put in my path.’ I love people. I think that’s apparent. I think I’m a nice person, that’s apparent. It was just this one thing, and I asked not to work with Dr. Luke just because I had not a good experience with him,” said Clarkson. “If an artist like me, I generally love everyone. You have to really be a special kind of … for me not to like you.”
“They brought up writing credit at the end,” she went on. “They were like, ‘Well, you changed the song.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t want my name near his. I want to pretend this didn’t happen in my life and I want to forget it.'”
Watch Clarkson’s full interview with Z100, in which she also discusses her upcoming album and her gig on The Voice, below.
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