Watch Ms. Lauryn Hill Cover Nina Simone On The Tonight Show
Lauryn Hill has been in the music-business wilderness for more than a decade, and she only very rarely gives televised performances. (There was a Beatles cover on Letterman last year, but that’s pretty much the only one in recent memory.) But while we may never get a proper follow-up to The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, Hill has kept busy lately, recording six different Nina Simone covers for the recent tribute compilation Nina Revisited: A Tribute To Nina Simone, released in conjunction with the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?. And last night on The Tonight Show, she came through to sing her cover of “Feeling Good,” perhaps Simone’s best-known song. Backed by a massive live band that included strings and horns, Ms. Lauryn Hill sang the absolute hell out of the song, starting understated and building to climax after climax, even scatting a bit at the end. She can sing. Watch the performance below.
Nina Revisited is out now on RCA.