When Kelly Clarkson's 2004 sophomore album Breakaway saw her embrace her rockier side courtesy of mosh-friendly bangers like Since U Been Gone, many fans began to see the young pop starlet and American Idol winner as a breath of fresh air in mainstream music.
Fast forward almost two decades and Clarkson has once again embraced her love for heavy music, courtesy of stirring cover of a Soundgarden classic on her daytime chat show, The Kelly Clarkson Show. In the latest of her 'Kellyoke' segments, in which Clarkson performs her take on an iconic track by another artist, the singer does a fine job of stepping into the daunting shoes of the late, great Chris Cornell, giving a full-hearted version of Black Hole Sun that has the live audience bowled over.
Watch the performance below.
Black Hole Sun was originally released on Soundgarden's critically acclaimed and hugely successful 1994 album, Superunknown. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2014, Chris Cornell said of the record: “We wanted to show that we stood alone and outside of what was becoming a convenient geographic group that we were inside. I never felt bad about being lumped in with other Seattle bands. I thought it was great.
"But I also felt like all of us were going to have to prove that we could also exist with autonomy," he continued, "and we deserved to be playing on an international stage, and we deserved to have videos on TV and songs on the radio, and it wasn’t just a fad like the ‘British invasion’ or a ‘New York noise scene.’ Superunknown was that for me. It was showing what we were not just a flavor of the month. We had the responsibility to seize the moment, and I think we really did.”
