Kelly Clarkson Talks Balancing Work and Mom Life During Quarantine

Kelly Clarkson and her husband, Brandon Blackstock, share two young kids, and Clarkson is also stepmom two Blackstock’s two children from a previous relationship who split time with their parents. The family is currently spending their quarantine on their ranch in Montana, where Clarkson has begun filming remote content for her talk show, The Kelly Clarkson Show. During a virtual appearance on the Today show this week, Clarkson opened up about life at the ranch, discussing how she’s balancing her job with parenting her kids.

“Nine times out of ten, my kids are losing it ’cause they have to do school, which is somehow a shock every day as well as naptime, it’s super fun,” she told Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager. “I’m cooking all the time and cleaning all the time while doing work for several things. It’s the most insane thing ever, honestly. And I drink a bit of wine, but we’re hanging in there, so it’s good.”

“Patience isn’t a virtue that I hold,” she joked. “I’m very, I like to say passionate… I make jokes and I smile a lot and everything and especially with my show too… it is a very hard thing for such an extrovert that is used to living a schedule every day. There are lots of us that were so used to certain schedules, and just being trapped and not supposed to be around people is a very, kind of damaging thing to your psyche.”

Along with working on her show, Clarkson released her new single, “I Dare You,” on Thursday. The American Idol winner shared that there was some conversation about whether to move the song’s release date due to the coronavirus but ultimately, Clarkson felt that the song’s message was important to share. “This has been our release date for a while now and we talked about delaying it, but we ended up just keeping it because I feel like it’s one of those times that it couldn’t have been a more perfect message for right now,” she said. “It is funny with the kids and it is hard, doing the teaching and all those kind of things but it can be depressing, this kind of isolation. It can be a little dark for everyone and there’s a lot of uncertainty.”

“So we felt like the message — before the pandemic, we thought it was a globally connecting environment, the message, but now even more so.” Clarkson released five additional duets of the track with five international artists in different languages and shared that “it was just a real cool thing that we wanted to do beforehand that was really connecting us all as a human race again.”