Who couldn’t use a welcome dose of KC? With her new song, Kelly Clarkson challenges the listener to discard their preconceptions and opt for loving one another. “I Dare You” clips along at a pounding dive-bar pace on the verses before flying overhead with a celestial-formed hook. It’s both soothing and unimaginably inescapable.
“We’re all full of hope, tryna stay afloat, tryna save one another,” she observes in the second verse. “People let you drown / ‘Cause they don’t know how to stay above water / When they’re too broken to know what they’ve put you through / Do the only thing that you’d want done to you.” The proposition whisks into the eardrums, and while such sentiments might be tough to swallow, even know, it cuts to the core of what drives humanity: love or the lack of it (as Mr. Rogers would say).
Listen to “I Dare You” below.