Here’s the hard truth: Mike Watt only plays bass on three tracks. So all of you fiending for some miraculous marriage of the underground and overground on Kelly Clarkson’s My December will have to wait for her next album.

Assuming there is one. That’s because Clarkson made a bold move on her latest, cowriting each track to label head Clive Davis’s dismay (and holding up the album’s release). Unintentionally, she also forced the issue: Did we download “Since U Been Gone” for the artistry of Clarkson or writer-producer Max Martin?

If My December is supposed to be her argument for the former, the latter wins out. Suffering from a surplus of lite Aerosmith and overstuffed Evanescence caricatures, the album reveals a muddled, trite songwriter, albeit one who has pipes that can glide between R&B, pop and rock—no small feat.

Supporters portrayed Davis’s disapproval of this album as a battle of art versus commerce, pitting the young female artiste against the old male record exec. The truth, in spite of our widespread delusion that songwriting equals authenticity, is that the best pop—like any product—comes from a division of labor, something a Svengali like Davis (Whitney Houston, Alicia Keys) surely knows well. Until Clarkson spends more time honing her craft, Martin and the other absent pro songwriters who helped her become the massive chart-topper she is will simply be the better options.

Clarkson was scheduled to play Chicago earlier this summer on a leviathan tour, the kind befitting an American Idol winner. But with underwhelming ticket sales and the album delay, that trek was canceled. Too much self-sufficiency can be lethal to a packaged pop star’s career.