“Who you are is who you are, and that’s alright but it’s not right for me,” Danielle Bradbery sings in the bridge of her painfully relatable song “Potential.” If you haven’t yet heard the song, which Bradbery has been playing in writers’ rounds for some time, you can catch it as part of the YouTube Music Foundry series.
There’s nothing potential about the singer’s vocal mastery here – Bradbery begins incredibly low in her range, then reaches high for the beginning of the chorus: “I’m not in love with you.”
“I’m in love with your potential,” she continues.
For many, the lyric, written by Bradbery with Emily Weisband (you know her from Drew Baldridge’s “Rebound”) and Johan Lindbrandt, will hit unnervingly close to home – that feeling for someone that’s rooted in who they are, not how they’re being. Though the lyric suggests she’s at peace with the situation – “I can’t wait, but I can’t wait to see” – her delivery is quavering and melancholic, strong yet vulnerable.
Listen to Bradbery’s stellar performance below: