Failures pave the road to her successes

Kelly Clarkson took the stage Sunday night at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City behind a floor-to-ceiling scrim filled with tabloid clippings and newspaper articles. As her band built the slow swell of "Dark Side," red block letters several times Clarkson's height plucked out bullet points from the whirl of gossip. One read, "30 & Still Single," another, simply, "Fat." Just before the curtain rose, one final jab: "Failure."

There's a sense in which failure - romantic, personal, and even professional - is the cornerstone of Clarkson's success. Crowned the first American Idol champion before anyone knew what that meant, she went on to become the show's biggest success story, selling 12 million copies of her second album, Breakaway. A very public battle with her record label over the direction of her next album (the dark-hued My December) followed, as did a tour that had to be scaled down due to slow ticket sales. "Dark Side" notwithstanding, Clarkson has stopped taking herself quite so seriously. But her songs are still full of lines that, less exuberantly delivered, might give cause for concern.

In "You Love Me," Clarkson parroted an abusive lover, singing, "I'm not good enough" and "I'm just a sinking ship" without letting the words' sting mute the song's forceful rebuttal. "(Stronger) What Doesn't Kill You," the sort-of title track of her fifth album, Stronger, could have served as a mantra for her entire career, condensing a theme so oft-repeated, it scarcely needs summarizing. Song after song, from "Since U Been Gone" to "Walk Away" to "Because of You," she was laid low and rose again, never staying on top for long.

After 10 years, the formula ought to have hardened into shtick, but Clarkson remains a singularly genuine performer, in striking contrast to her prefab path to fame. Throughout the 90-minute show, she bantered with her band members, the audience, even an inattentive spotlight operator, constantly going off script, but never losing the plot. The songs themselves weren't quite so spontaneous, more on the order of well-scrubbed and moderately spiky. But Clarkson never let the audience lose sight of the fact that there was a real person at the music's center, one who has made every setback into a path forward.