Brianna Cameron turned Kelly Clarkson emotional on Monday night’s new Cut Week round of The Voice, singing Natalie Cole’s “Inseparable” and earning a comparison to Whitney Houston before advancing to the live rounds. The 13-year-old Team Kelly singer left Clarkson in tears and moved her coach to call the performance “insane.”
That reaction is why Brianna Cameron on The Voice is drawing attention now. Cut Week changes the pace of the competition by forcing each coach to shrink a seven-singer team to three ahead of the live shows, which means one strong performance can decide a singer’s next step as much as the cut line does. Clarkson said Cameron looked like “young Whitney Houston,” then added that she had not heard runs like that since Whitney and struggled to see the teenager as anything but extraordinary.
Queen Latifah also singled out Cameron’s poise, calling the performance “almost unfathomable” for someone so young. Clarkson then chose Cameron to move on with Koumba Diallo and Anna McElroy, while Kyle Davis, Brooklyn Marie, Marcus Ladden Jr. and Nina Howland were sent home from Team Kelly. The episode marked the first time The Voice has used Cut Week, and Carson Daly warned that more than half of the artists would see their journeys end after the night was over.
There was still a catch. Even with cuts this steep, one eliminated contestant will have a chance to come back through viewer voting, which gives the round a second layer of uncertainty that previous stages did not have. The live shows begin next week, and the season finale is set for Dec. 14, so Cameron’s performance landed at the exact point in the season when a breakthrough can change everything.
For Cameron, the result was simple: she sang one of the night’s biggest songs, drew the loudest praise of the episode and walked out with a place in the live rounds. For everyone else, Cut Week made clear that The Voice is narrowing fast.
