Pop Corner: Sam Smith dries his eyes and Gaga grows up

Track of the week: Too Good At Goodbyes by Sam Smith
Look, it was never going to be a banger, was it? But we've moved on from crying into your glass of wine to shedding a single glam tear and you walk away, head raised, from your ex that broke your heart. "Every time you leave me, the quicker these tears dry," Sam warbles with dignity. And there's a great gospel choir in the chorus.

Hero of the week is Kelly Clarkson, who talked about defying her label after she didn't want to work with Dr Luke. She told radio station Z100 that she turned down a co-writing credit on the resulting track. "They brought up writing credit at the end, because they were like, 'Well, you changed the song,' and I was like, 'I don't want my name near his. I want to pretend this didn't happen in my life, and I want to forget it.' There's hundreds of thousands of dollars gone because of that, or millions, actually. That song was huge. But I was making a point to the people working with me. This is how much I didn't want to do this."

Meanwhile, Gaga revealed how she's grown as an artist in a segment in her documentary Five Foot Two. She said: "I want to become a woman in this business and grow up. When you become famous at 21 or 22, it's like you stop growing up. I want to become a woman because the truth is that I can always bring my past with me, but I can never go back. You've got to leave yourself behind."

Zero of the week is not being true to yourself, Lauren Jauregui from Fifth Harmony told Out magazine. She spoke about deciding to come out as bisexual in an open letter last year, explaining: "A lot of artists are held back by the notion that they'll lose their fan base or alienate themselves. Even friends and family would tell me to keep it to myself. But the more I thought about it, the more I was like, 'Why?'"