When a cover is done right, it can be even better than the original.
Most often, the key is to do it in an entirely different style or genre. If an artist tries to cover Adele in the exact same style, it’s pretty unlikely (if not impossible) that they’ll sound better than Adele—and the same goes for an iconic singer like Britney Spears. So when Thirdstory got together with YEBBA, they covered her song “Lucky: in their own acoustic, acappella style…and they nailed it!
Elliott Skinner, Ben Lusher, and Richard Saunders met in New York and became Thirdstory. They have more than 60k followers on Instagram and 300,000 monthly listeners on Spotify!
For this cover, they called in vocalist YEBBA (born Abbey Smith) to do lead vocals.
The three boys backed her up with harmonized vocals and one simple acoustic guitar. They recorded the cover without any professional equipment, in what looks like someone’s home hallway! But hey, it was a great choice because it’s got some good acoustics.
The cover has racked up more than 1.7 million views, with adoring fans blown away by their incredible voices.
They covered “Lucky,” originally sung by pop icon Britney Spears.
The song is perfectly suited to their slow, emotional acoustic cover—and actually, the way they play it is way better-suited to the lyrics than the upbeat pop style in which it was originally recorded! The song is about a girl who’s rich and famous and seems to have it all. Everyone wants to be her and she projects like a happy, successful woman. But deep down she’s lonely.
In hindsight, it’s probably exactly how Britney was feeling in 2000:
“She’s so lucky, she’s a star
But she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart, thinking
If there’s nothing missing in my life
Then why do these tears come at night?”
Though the song came out a long time ago, it was about time someone adapted this song to suit the lyrics.
Somehow the upbeat, very 2000s-style pop song and autotune just don’t have the same effect.
Thirdstory and YEBBA’s emotional cover will hit you right in the feels.
This isn’t the only time this quartet have worked together.
After the success of their Britney Spears cover back in 2016, they realized how cohesive their unique voices were. They all sang backup vocals for Chance the Rapper when he performed “Same Drugs” on Saturday Night Live, and that really helped to skyrocket their careers. SNL has a way of doing that for actors, comedians and musicians alike!
Thirdstory continued to perform with Chance for his entire Be Encouraged tour. They have also worked with other amazing artists like YEBBA to cover a variety of genres and released their own album, Cold Heart, which features one track with rapper Pusha T.
YEBBA has since gone on to win a Grammy for her extremely powerful vocal feature in PJ Morton’s “How Deep Is Your Love” last year.
She has half a million Instagram followers and a whopping 3.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
You’ll never hear the Britney Spears version the same way again.
This definitely won’t be the last we hear from Thirdstory and YEBBA, and we hope they work together as a quartet again soon.
Watch the moving, beautiful acoustic cover below!
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