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You’re a Kelly Clarkson Song: Top 5 Songs Post Breakup

I love love. I love everything about it, writing it, reading it, living it, watching other people fall in love. I cry at car commercials and weep over strangers’ wedding favors. I believe in happily ever afters and am an incurable optimist about relationships and dating.

Which is what makes break ups so. Very. Hard. Ugh, the break ups. The slow fade, the ghost, the acrimonious split, however it happens, losing your love or even the prospect of love is tough! It’s okay to be sad and grieve.

Normally romance novels are my refuge, but NOT when I’m licking my wounds or cradling my pride. No. That’s when I turn to music.

Friends, let’s go over a few of the essentials on my Dance Them Off playlist.

1. Kelly Clarkson’s Stronger

One time I was visiting Santa Barbara with a friend, and we decided to sit in our car and look at the ocean. There was a woman sitting in a car next to us, eating ice cream and blasting Stronger. When she replayed it immediately, my friend and I exchanged a look.

When she hit repeat for the ninth time, I almost got out of my car to ask her if she was ok.

2. Solange’s Cranes in the Sky

Sister Beyonce’s Lemonade album (sans the reconciliation parts) and Who Run the World are givens for a breakup playlist, but never overlook Solange! Cranes in the Sky is moody and brilliant and perfect for when you’re crying into that blanket you knit for his sister’s baby shower and WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO WITH IT NOW. Ahem.

3. Ariana Grande’s thank u next

“Is Ariana happy??” is not a question I ever thought I would ask more than once, if ever, but here we are in 2018. If you’re like me, you listened to this song for a whole weekend and hoped that one day, Ariana gives us all her therapist’s digits.

Ugh, I just want her to be happy.

(bonus rec for Demi Lovato’s Tell Me You Love Me because you can never have enough songs telling you to love yourself.)

4. Ruth B’s Superficial Love

I adore Ruth B.’s voice and Superficial Love is the righteous song you need to listen to ESPECIALLY after a ghost (I’m so done/not being your number one/if you want to keep me than you better treat me/like a damn princess/no make that an empress). You don’t need that superficial love, baby. You’re meant for MORE.

5. The Break Up Song

While Bollywood is most famous for love songs, the industry did give us a song just for breakups, appropriately entitled…The Break Up Song. You don’t need to speak Hindi to get the gist of this catchy upbeat tempo, but if you do put the English captions on, it features fantastic lyrics that translate roughly to “Look baby, I feel what you did/is very very right/now forget the past/the coming future is very bright” and “now that your beloved is gone/your cupid is alive again/now remove this stinky old label of relationship/and tell the world that you are available.” YEAH I WILL DO THAT. And I will do it while dressed fabulously and in a choreographed number in an international nightclub. Well maybe not that last part, but a girl can dream.

Look, breakups are hard, don’t be too hard on yourself. The important thing is to remember that you won’t always feel the way you feel right now. In the infinite wisdom of Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness: “You are strong, you’re a Kelly Clarkson song, you got this.

Alisha Rai

Alisha Rai writes award-winning emotionally complex contemporary romance novels and is frequently sought as a speaker on a range of topics covering romance and media. She is the first author to have an indie-published book appear on Washington Post's annual Best Books list. Her books have also been named Best Books of the Year by NPR, Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, Amazon, Kirkus, Bustle, and Cosmopolitan Magazine and her novels have won the RT Reviewer's Choice Award for erotic and contemporary romance. When she's not writing, Alisha is traveling and tweeting.