Sara Bareilles, Kelly Rowland on sight-unseen singing show 'Breakthrough': 'I think it would save a lot of women in the industry'
Both pop stars says they would have loved it if a competition like this had existed when they were first starting out.
The Voice claims to be based on just vocals and not looks, but once the coaches turn their red chairs and see who’s auditioning onstage, all bets are off — and it becomes a normal singing competition, a la American Idol or The X Factor. That is not the case with Audible’s new audio-only show Breakthrough (sort of the Love Is Blind of singing competitions), for which judges Kelly Rowland and Sara Bareilles spent weeks on Zoom mentoring five contestants... without ever seeing what these singers looked like.
“We don't know their ages. We don't know what they look like. We could have passed these folks in the street and not had a clue,” Rowland chuckles, as she and Bareilles sit on Zoom together, chatting with Yahoo Entertainment ahead of this week’s Breakthrough finale when they’ll finally get to meet the show’s hopefuls in person. Both pop stars admit they would have loved it if a competition like Breakthrough had existed when they were first starting out.
“Oh my goodness! I think it would save a lot of women in the industry from feeling self-critical,” says Rowland — who was actually “traumatized” 30 years ago, at age 12, when Destiny’s Child, then going by the name Girls’ Tyme, lost on a very different talent show, Star Search. “Because you're always thinking, ‘Well, what do [record executives] want to see?’ I say, ‘Who gives the crap what they want to see? What do you want to express?’ The industry is always all about the image and how you look and what you have on, but that is out the window with this show. It’s the talent first, which is sometimes — most times — overlooked because of everything else, because everybody is thinking about the ‘full package.’ I understand the executive side, but I also am an artist, so you want people to hear you before they start to judge you.”
“It's hard in this industry, because record labels were always trying to figure out where to put me,” adds Bareilles. “And every artist hates answering the question, ‘Well, who are you?’ When you're young and still figuring out that question for yourself, it's very daunting to have to figure out, ‘How do I commercialize my art? How do I make the world of all of me bite-size, and a product, and brand-worthy?’ That was very destabilizing for me. I mean, I was someone who got bullied in school growing up, had a lot of dysmorphia, was very self-critical, and really had tons of insecurities that I still deal with to this day. And I think so many people relate to that, whether you're a f***ing goddess, superstar, and global icon like Kelly — or you're me! If you're trying to just be able to be truthful in your art, this show is a very liberating process for that.”
Audible · Sara and Kelly discussing all the contestants
Bareilles — who, unlike Rowland, got a relatively late start in the music business, signing her first record deal at age 27 — recalls how she was once constantly compared to other female singer-songwriters by lazy music executives and journalists. “I was a ‘woman who played piano.’ So, it was every piano-playing woman: It was Norah Jones, it was Sarah McLachlan, it was Vanessa Carlton. These are all actually friends of mine at this point, and artists I listened to, but I wouldn't necessarily say that we make music that sounds the same. But I think it was just easier and more palatable to be like, ‘Norah Jones meets Sarah McLachlan,’ instead of '27-year-old woman who writes in a lot of different styles and is just going to be a sensation eventually.’ By the end I was just like, ‘Yeah, fine, whatever. It doesn't f***ing matter. You say whatever you wanna say, I'm just going to keep making music. It's not my concern how you figure out what box I'm in.’”
Rowland had similar experiences throughout her career, from the very beginning — all based on her image, not her vocals. “I remember at that time, it was TLC, Xscape, Spice Girls,” she says of the early, baffling Destiny’s Child comparisons. “And we're from Houston — we don't sound like them! … Why are you going to do this to young girls? They're already under a microscope as it is, and you actually exacerbate it. That’s just really frustrating. And of course, when I broke out to go solo, it was people comparing me to other female artists in the industry. I mean, why can't everybody just be in their own boxes, and you just be smart enough to respect everybody in their respective spaces? Comparisons make me sick to my stomach, because I think they're for the simple-minded. And I think that when it comes to comparing women, that's happened for years. It's happened for so long that it… oh man, don't let me start on my soapbox!
“I feel like it's not really us women that do it,” Rowland continues, getting even more fired up. “It's been used as a tool to actually continue to try to separate [female artists], to make us look at each other in this space and say, ‘I could do it better.’ And it's not about that. I can't stand that. Just do it at your best capacity, at your greatest capacity as a woman, and be inspired — and be someone else's inspiration as well.”
Bareilles is grateful that she was “older compared to so many of my contemporaries” when she released her major-label debut, Little Voice, in 2007, because she believes she “would've gotten swallowed whole” if she’d been thrust into the spotlight as a teenager, like Rowland was. “I don't think I would've had enough time to really like get to know who I am,” she explains. “But I think [my age] fed into this narrative of like, ‘We don't know what to do with you.’ Like, I did showcases for lots of labels and they were like, ‘You're talented, but we don't know what to do with you.’ … I remember sending out demos and there was a high-powered music attorney that didn't respond, and then eventually I followed up to get feedback and he said, ‘I think you have a nice voice. But... that's kind of it.’ I was so heartbroken. I remember sitting in my car and crying and crying.”
Ironically, usually the grand prize of any singing competition is a big record contract, but Bareilles says when she finally signed with Epic Records, she sobbed again. “I was terrified for so much of my career that I had ‘sold out.’ I was really afraid that I would get eaten up,” she reveals. “I'm very tender-hearted. I'm really sensitive. And I was afraid I wasn't strong enough to move through this industry. I didn't have enough faith in myself to know that you are your home, wherever you go. I didn't have enough faith in that. So, I cried like a baby.”
But Rowland and Bareilles, now both in their early forties, eventually learned to have faith in their talent. For instance, after losing on Star Search and “crying hysterically” and “thinking the world was over,” Rowland and her fellow Girls’ Tyme members returned to Houston and “it was like a screw became tighter and we were being prepared for the future. When we came home, we were in rehearsals, voice lessons, dance lessons, everything. Everybody shifted in their thought. It was like, ‘You ain't gonna say no to us next time!’” By the time a solo Rowland collaborated with superstar DJ David Guetta for the 2009 EDM smash “When Love Takes Over” — which went to No. 1 in 10 countries, topped Billboard's Dance Club Songs chart that year, and was nominated for two Grammys — she was able to stand her ground when an executive warned her that that track “was not going be a big record. … I think it’s safe to say that person was wrong.”
“I've been rejected many, many, many, many, many times and told that I didn't have the right idea about my own songs,” Bareilles says, recalling a time when she too had to stand her ground. “I remember that one of the executives at my label wanted to add drums to ‘Gravity’ and bring another chorus into the end. And I got ambushed: It was very traumatic, where I walked into a studio and there were people I wasn't expecting to be there, and they were like, ‘This needs to happen.’ And I'm like, ‘You're crazy!’ And I was l crying and upset, of course. But I was just like, ‘No, I know this song. I know it.’ And that song's never been on the radio, but it's one of the most widely received and beloved songs that I have in my canon. It didn't need drums, and it didn't need a second chorus, or a third chorus.”
Now Bareilles and Rowland, who have both judged other singing competitions like The X Factor and The Sing-Off, are applying all of their full-circle life lessons to help the contestants of Breakthrough. “To me, it felt like a time machine,” says Bareilles, who got her start playing small L.A. bars and cafés. “It was so intimate, because you're not having to filter through all of this other visual information, all of the biases and assumptions you make about someone because you see the way they look. I was so impressed with just how close we got [to the contestants]. It felt like there were real relationships growing here, and we felt very invested in them doing well and breaking through their own barriers.”
“It's just about listening and letting your other senses kick in,” says Rowland. “That was the main thing for me. I was like, ‘If I can't see this person, you gotta make me feel something.’”
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