the covers

emotions, which is the important one

recorded as a teenager and posted to her own channel, years before a record deal. it is still the most-watched thing there, it is where the mariah carey comparison begins, and it is the source of essentially every published claim about her upper range.

what makes it worth finding is not the notes. it is that everything the records would later be built on — the placement, the control, the stacked instinct — is already there at fifteen, in a bedroom, with no production.

the ones on stage

• get happy / happy days are here again, with cynthia erivo at the o2 in august 2026. a judy garland and barbra streisand medley, in a surprise-song slot, on one of the last nights of the tour.
• for good, from wicked, the same night — the two of them singing a song from their own film as a cover of themselves, which is a strange and rather lovely thing.
• give it up, with liz gillies, on the sweetener world tour. a nickelodeon duet performed in an arena seventeen years into a friendship.
• my everything and beyond. she has covered whitney houston repeatedly in televised performances, which is a considerable risk and not always a successful one.

the covers hidden inside her own songs

why she covers so little

she does not do the standard pop-star thing of a live radio cover every promotional cycle, and she never has. the plausible reason is the one that runs through the whole catalogue: her records are arrangements of her own voice in layers, and a solo cover on a radio piano gives none of that anywhere to go.

the exceptions are almost all duets — erivo, gillies, carey. she covers with people rather than alone, which is consistent with everything else about how she works.