U.K. songstress Cher Lloyd got her start on the seventh season of “The X Factor,” where vocal coach Savan Kotecha inspired her to cover Usher’s “OMG.” Below, watch the 18-year-old star perform the cover and talk about this small moment that changed the big picture in her career.
“The moment I met Savan [Kotecha] was quite strange for me,” Lloyd recalls. “He stayed for me throughout the whole process on “The X Factor” in the U.K. and he helped me out with picking songs and with the arrangements of them. He asked me to do a cover of a song, so I chose “OMG” by Usher. And I tried to change it to adapt the song to make it sound like me, and it was a really great moment. He said he liked it because it sounded completely different.”
Photos: Behind-the-Scenes at Cher Lloyd’s Candid Covers Session
She picked “OMG” because it’s a “guy’s song,” and sometimes female covers can sound to much like the original, Lloyd explains. “[Kotecha] will take a song and inspire me to change it, to make it different and original. He helped me along with the process of that competition and he went on to help me with many other things, and he still helps me today.”
Lloyd’s latest single, “Want U Back,” was released in February, and features vocals by U.S. “X Factor” contestant Astro. “It’s quite surprising to me the amount of U.S. fans that I do have,” she muses in the Q&A above. “I mean this is the first time for me actually coming over and saying, ‘you know what I’ve got a new single.’ And it’s very daunting because I come from the U.K. and you don’t know whether people are going to like you or not. What works in the U.K. necessarily doesn’t work in the U.S., but the response has been amazing especially with the new single, ‘Want U Back.'”
Watch Cher Lloyd perform an acoustic version of “Want U Back” below.