Kelly Clarkson Forgets Her Own Song While Battling Anne Hathaway — Again

Kelly Clarkson just can’t seem to catch her breath when it comes to battling her musical match, Anne Hathaway.

“Anne Hathaway is never invited back,” Clarkson, 42, joked during a game of “Pop Pop Quiz” on the Tuesday, April 30, episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show. “I’m just kidding. This is actually becoming a schtick for our show.”

Per the game rules, Hathaway and Clarkson competed against each other to finish a lyric. “As we’ve witnessed, Kelly Clarkson doesn’t always know her own lyrics. But that’s OK because what doesn’t kill you makes you a fighter, and makes your footsteps even … what?” Amber Ruffin, who was hosting the game, asked.

Clarkson enthusiastically pressed her button as she yelled, “Lighter!” She then declared, “That’s Christina Aguilera!”

“Did you wait? Don’t you pity me!” Clarkson asked Hathaway after she won that round of the game. Hathaway, for her part, quipped, “I didn’t wait on that one. No, I genuinely didn’t know that one.”

Clarkson then later spoke directly to the cameras as she said, “So, you’ll notice, America, if you know my catalog at all, ‘cause I don’t, I thought I was singing Christina Aguilera’s song ‘Fighter,’ and I was singing mine, ‘Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You).’ It’s one of those days. Anyway, Anne Hathaway is my kryptonite. It’s fine.”

On Clarkson’s 2011 track “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” she sings “What doesn’t kill you makes a fighter / Footsteps even lighter.”

This isn’t the first time Clarkson has tripped up over her music around Hathaway. When competing against The Idea of You star during an episode of her daytime talk show in 2022, Clarkson wasn’t able to identify her own song during a game of “Name That Tune.”

Hathaway was winning the game when Clarkson asked her band out of joking frustration, “Can y’all play a fricking song I’ll know?” When the band began to play the first few notes of Clarkson’s hit “Since U Been Gone,” Hathaway beat Clarkson to the punch and proceeded to belt out the tune.

Clarkson, for her part, jokingly fell to the ground at the realization that she didn’t recognize her own track.

“How did you know it from just that?” Clarkson asked once Hathaway had completed her performance of the song, to which Hathaway replied, “Kelly Clarkson if you do not understand how much we love that song. Everybody here knew it on the first one. Everybody here knew it.”

Clarkson cursed as she joked, “Should I just quit? Oh, my God. This is embarrassing.”