Katharine McPhee jokingly reveals why she married David Foster

McPhee and Foster first tied the knot in 2019

Katharine McPhee has hilariously hit back at some of the criticism she’s faced since marrying her husband David Foster.

The 33-year-old singer took to TikTok on 8 January to briefly address her relationship with Foster, who she’s been married to since 2019. In the video, McPhee, who was wearing a leather shirt and pants, and had her hair in a slicked-back bun, could be seen looking in a mirror.

As she turned her head towards the camera, text over the video showed a question she often gets about her relationship: “Why’d you marry David Foster…?”

When responding to the question, McPhee simply recited a line that Kim Kardashian said during an episode of The Kardashians. “Because it’s iconic,” the American Idol alum mouthed in the video. “And I love doing iconic s***.”

The TikTok video has quickly gone viral, with more than 918,00 views as of 9 January. In the comments, many fans have gone on to applaud McPhee and her relationship.

“And so you could make little musical geniuses!!!” one responded to the video, while another added: “Wait but like YOU are iconic…. just you sis.”

This isn’t McPhee’s first time hitting back at criticism over her relationship. Shortly after announcing her engagement to Foster, 74, in 2018, she took to X – formerly known as Twitter – to seemingly hit back at trolls who were mocking her and her partner’s age gap.

“Y’all should be worrying more about registering to vote and midterm elections than who’s marrying me,” she wrote. “Thank you for coming to my TED talk.”

Foster and McPhee first made their official debut as a couple in 2018, before tying the knot the next year. They welcomed their first child, Rennie, together in February 2021.

Aside from hitting back at criticism about her relationship, McPhee has also spoken candidly about her dynamic with Foster. During an interview with People in November 2023, the couple discussed the different ways they parent their son, as McPhee noted that she wanted to “discipline” her child in her “own way”.

“There’s the more old-fashioned way of disciplining which involves time-outs and things like that,” she said. “My take is that you can have more mindful parenting opposed to just assuming that a two or three year old can have time alone to reflect on what they’ve done poorly.”

She shared her belief that with a “more new way of parenting”, she’s realised that there’s only so much that children “can intellectually understand”. She then described some of the parenting tactics she avoids, adding: “Saying ‘That was really bad, that was really, really bad,’ gets into a shaming thing. I think disciplining is something that happens over time.”

However, according to McPhee, her husband – who has five adult children – has a different approach to parenting than her. She said the reason for those differences could be due to their age gap, as they’re parents who are from different generations than each other.

“David’s more results-based. He’s like: ‘He can’t just walk by and swat people,’" she said. “Of course not. But he’s two and a half and he’s learning those things.”

“It’s just a different approach. I think his era of parenting is different than mine,” she added.