walking upstream…
Jess Glynne
photo: drew de f fawkes · cc by 2.0 ↗Jess Glynne
sourcesLondon Evening Standard — "I don't know what I want now" (Winehouse and Houston testimony, bio) · Gulf News — "Jess Glynne comes out of the shadows" (Winehouse, Prince, and Houston testimony) · Billboard — "Jess Glynne Finds Her Voice After Overcoming Traumatic, Terrifying Throat Surgery" (Prince corroboration, bio) · Rolling Stone UK — "I'll always hold my hands up when I make a mistake" (Winehouse corroboration)
Jessica Glynne grew up in Muswell Hill, North London, in a house stacked with soul and R&B records — her mother a former Atlantic Records A&R rep, her father an estate agent. School talent shows never worked out, and at fifteen The X Factor rejected her. It took a year-long course at the British Academy of New Music, and a songwriting partnership struck up there with fellow student Jin Jin, to give a music career shape: Black Butter Records signed her, then Atlantic in 2013. She broke through as a featured voice before her own name was on a chart, on Clean Bandit's Rather Be and Route 94's My Love, and her 2015 debut, I Cry When I Laugh, arrived days after emergency throat surgery threatened to end things before they started. Its gospel-scaled soul-pop made her the British woman with the most UK No. 1 singles in chart history.
the sound in question
2014
Rather BeJess Glynne
walk the tributaries ↓
Amy Winehouse2000s · Soul / Jazz / R&B
"Amy was a massive inspiration for giving me the confidence to do the thing I really wanted to do — she honestly spurred me on," Glynne has said of the fellow North London Jewish singer six years her senior. In her early teens, her parents came home from a night in Soho with a signed copy of Winehouse's debut, Frank, having just watched her play; Glynne calls the record "the soundtrack to my life." That confessional, plainspoken habit of turning private wreckage into a hooky first-person lyric became Glynne's own method, note for note.
listen: upstream & heresource: Official Charts Company — "Amy Winehouse gave me the confidence to do this" (Winehouse, Prince, and Houston testimony) ↗
2003
Stronger Than MeAmy Winehouse
2015
Don't Be So Hard On YourselfJess Glynne
listen forCue Winehouse's "Stronger Than Me," where she needles a lover in a lazy, brassy strut, then Glynne's "Don't Be So Hard On Yourself," a disco-piano pep talk aimed at herself instead of someone else. Both ride an unhurried, jazz-inflected phrasing that lands a beat behind the horns before it resolves into the joke or the comfort. Winehouse turns the directness outward; Glynne turns the same plainspoken confession on her own bad year — the exact lyric-writing habit she says the Frank album taught her.
Prince1980s · Funk / Pop / R&B / Rock
"When you're listening to a Prince album you're in it," Glynne told Official Charts in 2015, "it's not just on it the background. I wanted to make an album that feels like that." She names "I Wanna Be Your Lover" as one of her go-to happy songs, and says she had Prince on repeat while writing her debut. It was the immersive, whole-album feel she chased, not a vocal style to copy — a record built to be lived inside rather than skimmed for one single.
listen: upstream & heresource: Official Charts Company — "Amy Winehouse gave me the confidence to do this" (Winehouse, Prince, and Houston testimony) ↗
1979
I Wanna Be Your LoverPrince
2014
Right HereJess Glynne
listen forPlay Prince's "I Wanna Be Your Lover," all featherlight falsetto over a groove that never lets up, then Glynne's debut single "Right Here," which chases the same immersive, floor-ready bounce. Neither song leaves room to sit back in the mix — both push a bright, uptempo pulse right up against the vocal, built for pure, uncomplicated happiness rather than heartbreak, exactly the immersive feeling Glynne named as her model for the whole record.
Whitney Houston1980s · R&B / Pop / Soul
"I remember becoming obsessed with Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Aretha Franklin," Glynne told Official Charts. "I would listen to the song and then record myself singing in acapella using my tape player." A separate profile pins the childhood habit specifically on Houston: a kid alone in her bedroom, taping herself singing along. The power-voice discipline she drilled into herself that way — big, gospel-rooted belting stacked over uptempo pop — became the throughline into her own records.
listen: upstream & here
1987
I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)Whitney Houston
2015
Hold My HandJess Glynne
listen forSet Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)" against Glynne's "Hold My Hand": both ride a bright, four-on-the-floor pulse into a wide-open chorus built to be shouted back by a crowd, and both singers push a clean, huge voice into a gospel-scaled belt right at the hook. The production is stadium pop, but the phrasing underneath it is straight out of the soul tradition Houston helped define.