Danielle Bradbery Stuns With Haunting Cover of Kacey Musgraves’ ‘Slow Burn’ [Watch]
Danielle Bradbery just keeps getting better and better. The 22-year-old singer delivers her most mature, fully-realized performance yet with an achingly beautiful new cover of Kacey Musgraves' "Slow Burn."
The song is the fourth single from Musgraves' Grammy-nominated album Golden Hour, which took home Album of the Year honors at the 2018 CMA Awards in November. Bradbery retains the central acoustic guitar figure but replaces the banjo, vibe-y keys and percussion from Musgraves' original arrangement with perfectly-placed cello and piano, as well as some gentle vocal harmonies.
She delivers a subtly nuanced vocal performance that is both hauntingly soft and powerful in the moments where it needs to be. With this performance, Bradbery not only comes into her own as a fully developed artist, but she's also achieved the difficult task of making the listener forget how attached they are to the original and invest fully in her vision for the song.
The performance of "Slow Burn" is Bradbery's latest installment of her Yours Truly: 2018 covers project, which sees her re-interpreting her own favorite songs from across the musical spectrum in 2018 and posting the results to YouTube. She announced the project suddenly in late December, releasing a cover of Ariana Grande's "God Is a Woman" that same day.
"Slow Burn" is the second in the series, and Bradbery will release a cover of Post Malone's "Psycho" on Jan. 4. A press release announcing the project also teased two more "massive hits" that she'll be covering, but did not name them.
Bradbery first came to public attention during her run on Season 4 of The Voice in 2013, which ended with her winning the show and signing a record deal with Big Machine Records. She released her self-titled debut album in November of that year, then took four years between albums before returning with her sophomore project, I Don't Believe We've Met, in 2017. The title is a reference to how much Bradbery matured as an artist in those intervening years, and the singles from the album — including "Sway" and "Worth It" — demonstrate newfound artistry and confidence.
Bradbery's current single is "Goodbye Summer," a re-imagining of one of the tracks from I Don't Believe We've Met that adds Thomas Rhett to turn a wistful song about a summer romance into a duet in which both lovers look back with longing.
She's slated to hit the road with Kane Brown on his 2019 Live Forever Tour, which is set to launch on Jan. 10 in Duluth, Ga., and continue through March 8, when it wraps in Texas.
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