Despite her now-infamous 2019 tweet, Clarkson says she's not taking credit for Swift's re-releases.
Despite the now-infamous 2019 tweet in which she suggested to Taylor Swift that she re-record and re-release her old albums -- after Swift lost the rights to her masters when Scooter Braun purchased her former label, Big Machine Records -- Kelly Clarkson isn't taking any credit for the success of the Taylor's Version releases.
"She’s brilliant, she would’ve come up with that on her own, and she maybe already had before I even tweeted it," Clarkson told Andy Cohen in a new interview this week, in support of Clarkson's new album, Chemistry.
On July 13, 2019, days after Swift took to social media to share that she was unaware of the details of the sale beforehand -- stating that Braun owning her masters was "my worst case scenario" -- Clarkson reached out to Swift on Twitter, saying, "Just a thought, U should go in & re-record all the songs that U don’t own the masters on exactly how U did them but put brand new art & some kind of incentive so fans will no longer buy the old versions. I’d buy all of the new versions just to prove a point."
Swift did just that, and has already released the Taylor's Version of her albums Fearless and Red, with Speak Now (Taylor's Version) planned for a July 7 release this summer.
"I knew it was important to her, so I thought, why don't you just re-record them and your fans will support you? And literally she's a genius," Clarkson raved of Swift in her interview with Cohen. "Not only did she re-record it, she planned it like with this Eras Tour where she gets to like, this woman is brilliant."
However, not everyone was as thrilled with the outcome. Clarkson recalled an encounter with Braun shortly after her online exchange with Swift.
"I think Scooter took offense to it because we ran into each other, and I think he reached out at the time to my manager," she recalled. "I was like, it wasn't anything against him."
"He didn't say anything to me. I think he called my manager at the time I heard and he was just like, I don't know what happened or what was said, but I think he thought I was attacking him," she continued. "I was like, 'I honest to god didn't even realize like, who had the rights.' I didn't even know all the information."
A source told ET on Friday that it's not true that Braun reached out to Clarkson's manager because of her comments about Swift re-recording her albums -- adding that Braun and Clarkson have since cleared the air about the misunderstanding.
"Scooter was very publicly trying to get in touch with Taylor at the time to sell back her masters but she and her team were refusing a meeting," the source claimed. "After seeing Kelly’s comments in the media, Scooter reached out to her manager with hopes that Kelly could assist in reaching out to Taylor as a friend, to help him get in touch with her to discuss selling back her masters. Scooter was told at the time that Kelly didn’t have a direct relationship so the conversation was dropped, and Kelly was likely never made aware that this was why Scooter was actually reaching out at the time."
While Clarkson's certainly not taking any credit for Swift's successes, she said she was happy for a fellow artist to get their due.
"Like, she writes everything. It's so important to her," she said of Swift. "She's a businesswoman."
Clarkson's 10th studio album, Chemistry, is out now.
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