🇹🇭Nene Royal - UNCUT 5 Song Study: 'Always Somewhere,' 'Lovely,' 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' 'Married to the Blues' & BONUS: 'Real Verse' (52 min)

I've meant to get to comment on this for a few weeks, but life has been a bit busy. Sorry for the delay. You used the exact correct term for Nene; Prodigy. Without question she has a basket of natural tools underlying her talent that she's learned to access through hundreds (perhaps thousands) of hours of practice. She self taught herself guitar by watching YT videos on her phone, and then copying the finger placements she saw there over and over until she reproduced the same sounds. The massive number of hours that went into that is mind boggling. She then repeated that process with her voice. Deconstructing other singers from videos and figuring out how to make the same sounds. She is almost 100% self taught. She did get into a very good school, but she comes from a very very poor background and that was a scholarship that was earned through her singing, so it was already mature when she got there. The school provided mostly quality education for her in practical school topics. Musically she was far past what they could offer her already from what I have read. One of the qualities that I love about her is that she treats her voice like her guitar, and often plays her guitar like she sings. They are both tools to her I think, and she manipulates them without any assumptions of boundaries that many come to things with. They are channels for what she wants to express. Note in the piano work she does in the Eilish piece that she has a very unique style of playing regarding her use of her finger positions on the keys. No one taught her that, she taught herself clearly. She figured out how to make the sounds she wants, and damn the 'right way'. :) I wouldn't be surprised if she can play other instruments, and if she decided, could probably pick up any she chose and be decently proficient pretty quickly. The clips that you chose show that she is cross-genre in what she can do also. There were elements from just about all the major music groups, from rock to pop to country to R&B to blues, and so on in these clips. I wager she doesn't see genres just more musical tools to use when she wants to and sees fit. That she has moved on to working on original compositions shows that she has reached the limits of what covers offer her. She's used them to learn to express herself in unique ways, but they are still not her personal message. Now she's getting ready to make that jump. And as the guitar piece you ended with shows, she is clearly using the massive toolset she has built and creating something new and of her own with it. When she adds vocals it will be so very interesting to see what happens. I'll wager it will be a unique fusion sound of several genres. She is one to watch, and the two additional performances that she's done for AGT already are well worth looking into. Very worth reviewing. Her Cover of Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun was impressive, as was Hysteria by Muse. She made both her own. Thanks for a solid review Tim.

Loved your reaction! You should definitely check out her next AGT performance, "Hysteria." Just to clarify a quick detail about her background: that international school people mention wasn't where she originally learned music. Her family isn't wealthy, and she actually earned a full scholarship there because of her musical talent. From her interviews, she’s mostly self-taught on guitar after taking a few basic lessons (she started playing guitar around age 7). Then, she started taking vocal lessons later on.