She told W Magazine: “Whenever I was working at my part-time jobs, like nannying or the drive-through or doughnut shop, I kept hope alive because I knew I was really good. I knew I had to just give it one more year. And I got that courage by, honestly, just being in hell for a very long time. I was like, this sucks so bad, but keep going. Every day, I would think, Keep going, even if there was no sight of any light at the end of the tunnel. Zero!
“But I was like, what if it’s just around the corner? What if I stopped the day before that something is meant to happen? So I just kept going, and here we are.”
The Grammy Award-winning star - whose real name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz - tried to find success through television talent shows when she was a teenager but recalled at one of her auditions, she couldn’t even get a producer to pay the slightest bit of attention to her.
She said: “When I auditioned for The Voice, I was 15 and I sang Stay, by Rihanna. That was when the Bruno Mars song When I Was Your Man was really big, and I thought I was so unique in switching it around and singing When you were my man and making it about gender. But every girl was like, ‘I’m switching it around.’ By the way, when I did the Voice audition, the producer or whoever the f*** was watching did not even look up from his phone.
“He was like, ‘Okay, next.’ And I went up there and sang a cappella, the scariest thing ever. He never really looked at me. With America’s Got Talent, I was 13, and we flew to Austin, Texas, and waited in line with thousands of people at 4 am. I sang True Colors, by Cyndi Lauper. Did not make it either.”
