Thomas, you can’t just drop references to obscure figures like “Max Martin”…
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Thomas Inskeep: Superbly bouncy strong-woman pop. Co-written and produced by Greg Kurstin, who’s become the U.S. answer to Max Martin, it sounds great, with a slick-but-not-too sheen. But the credit here has to go to Clarkson, whose nakedly personal lyrics (about her absent father, contrasting him with her husband) not only make this song a real high-wire act that she pulls off: emotional, sincere, serious without ever coming off schmaltzy.
[8]
Alfred Soto: The couplets scan and Greg Kurstin’s modest beats underscore Clarkson’s masochistic conviction – she sings as if she’s trying to convince herself. It sounds airbrushed, though, requiring airplay and a programmer savvy enough to sequence it after The Weeknd’s “In the Night” for a quick lesson in what shitty male expectations do to a woman’s self-esteem.
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Jonathan Bogart: I don’t really know what to do with a Kelly Clarkson song where she doesn’t cut loose; there’s certainly enough emotion in the lyric that her usual jet-plane roar would feel earned. But maybe that’s just an effect of my not really knowing what to do with an emotion I can only relate to second-hand.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Kelly Clarkson smuggles her bitter words like “abandoned” inside a glossy coating that makes them go down more easily. But ever since she began to write for herself, her voice and her lyrics have worked in tandem in clever ways, and “Piece By Piece” is partly a survey over the terrain of heartbreak and partly a triumphant dash away from it. Even when glossy — maybe especially — she makes you empathise with her.
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Katherine St Asaph: I don’t doubt her conviction. I doubt that it’s attached to the best song.
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Will Adams: I generally enjoy Greg Kurstin’s work enough, though his recent ventures with Kelly Clarkson have largely resulted in a stream of lightly uplifting, uninteresting dance-rock singles, like the Breakaway singles and their dance remixes rolled into one. “Piece By Piece,” however, is an instance where it works. The devastating lyrics — which could turn melodramatic given the wrong arrangement — offer necessary contrast to the trance-leaning backing, and Clarkson gives one of her best vocals in a while, to boot.
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Megan Harrington: I guess I will go ahead and bring up “On Pandering.” Clarkson frames her narrative of overcoming her father’s absence with her marriage and motherhood. It’s hard to write about marriage and motherhood. Adele tried and scrapped an entire album for being too dull, not enough her, and then mined her childless, heartbroken past for inspiration. Clarkson always writes honestly, though not necessarily confessionally. “Piece by Piece” doesn’t play like a secret world, it plays like the world we can see on gossip sites. Kelly is happy, Kelly loves being a mother. “Since U Been Gone” is a modern classic, even the most passionate gatekeepers agree that it’s pop perfection and that Clarkson’s performance is what makes the song. What will these same authorities think of “Piece by Piece?” Largely, nothing at all. Girls are in, women are out. “Piece by Piece” is without the youthful suffocation of being forced to breathe again. It’s presented instead as a sigh of contented adulthood; this is a choice. I watched my own mother rise above her shitty childhood to care for my family and I know that though there will always be a triteness to a line like “I will never leave her like you left me” that you really do have to make that pledge each and every day. It’s ferocious.
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