Honestly, sometimes it feels like the only person putting goodness out into the world is Lizzo. The popstar warms our hearts, teaches us to be iconic, and has singlehandedly revolutionised how we collectively view the flute.
She’s a grafter, and it seems she always has been if these rediscovered moments from her youth are anything to go by. Yep, some intrepid online detective discovered Lizzo’s YouTube channel from when, to a cool audience of sub-1000 followers, she was covering pop gems from the early noughties.
This very cute cover of “Someone Like You” with Lizzo on keys will hit ya right in the feels. “Why aren’t you trying out for one of them big talent shows? X Factor maybe?” an early fan said in a comment five years ago, calling the then-23-year-old a “beautiful singer”.
She was also “snowed in” one day in early 2010, and so recorded this flawless cover of Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind” on what we can only assume is the older sister of Sasha Flute.
But dig a little deeper through her channel and you’ll find a true pop goldmine. Yep –- there it is in the description of one of her videos: Lizzo had an iconic Myspace page. There’s a few early demos and covers that have been uploaded there, and some have as few as 350 plays — a slight downgrade from the 22.2 million fans that currently stream her material on Spotify.
A lot of them — including a song called “The Future” and a gospel cover of Beyoncé’s “Hello” — were lost when Myspace moved servers last year, subsequently crushing the hearts of everyone trying to recover their own ukulele covers of Never Shout Never songs and, as it turns out, a bunch of die-hard Lizzo stans as well.
Never mind! What has survived is a handful of adorable self-timer photos from her early twenties that serve to remind you that Lizzo, like the rest of us, was a kid on the internet too.