Kelly Clarkson Debuts New Song, 'I Dare You'

Kelly Clarkson has officially debuted her new single "I Dare You," dropping the song on Thursday, April 16. The track took Clarkson over one year to complete and features five additional duets between The Voice coach and other singers in different languages, including Zaz ("Appelle Ton Amour" – French), Faouzia ("كنتحداك" – Arabic), Blas Cantó ("Te Reto A Amar" – Spanish), Glasperlenspiel ("Trau Dich" – German) and Maya Buskila ("בוא נראה" – Hebrew).

"I've had it for over a year, Hoda," Clarkson told Hoda Kotb Thursday on the Today show. "We've been working on this project for over a year because there's multi languages. There's multiple languages." "I grew up singing opera and I grew up singing different languages, like German, French, Italian and Spanish, that kind of stuff," she explained of the idea for the song. "And Latin. I always had the idea to do this as a project in my career and I never really had the song that I felt like fit with it nor did I have the team that really would back it, the idea."

"I Dare You" was written by Natalie Hemby, Laura Veltz and Ben West and was produced by Jesse Shatkin. "I dare you to love/ Oh, I dare you to love/ Even if you're hurt and you can only see the worst/ Even if you think it's not enough," Clarkson sings, sharing a message of positivity with her listeners.

"It's basically I dare you to love instead of fear, instead of hate, instead of wonder about something and actually people just engage with themselves again," the mom of two explained of the song's message. "And remember that we're all a human race. Even though we're from all different parts of the world and different religions, politics, whatever, you know at the end of the day we're all the same human race. And I thought, 'Wow, how ironic that we're releasing this single in this time where we really are all connected.'"

Clarkson added that the coincidence of releasing this specific song during the current pandemic isn't lost on her. "It was really cool. The message was perfect. I thought it was kind of globally connecting and I wanted to do that musically and then all this happened and we became extremely connected globally," she said. "And so, we just kept the release date because we were gonna shelve it for a minute, but it was planned to come out today and I thought maybe people need this kind of message right now, so we just kept with it."