Kelly Clarkson has a voice that’s special enough to tackle almost any song--but there’s one track the American Idol alum already knows she simply cannot touch.
On Monday night’s episode of The Voice, the coach told her team’s celebrity advisor, Luis Fonsi, that she loves his record-breaking single, “Despacito,” but she would be nervous to ever try and cover the song.
“I just realized something,” Clarkson told the musician backstage. “You have the one song in history that I‘m afraid to cover — ‘Despacito.’”
“Oh, come on, you have to cover it now,” Fonsi told Clarkson, who crafts covers of songs evert day on her daytime talk show series, The Kelly Clarkson Show.
“I have practiced so hard, because I love singing in Spanish and different languages, and it is like the biggest song of all time,” she explained. “But you‘re like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna leave that alone!’”
“Despacito,” Fonsi’s song with Daddy Yankee, was first. released back in January 2017, with a remix featuring Justin Bieber being released in April later that year. The bilingual smash hit ended up spending 16 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 chart, breaking every record imaginable.
At the time, the song tied with Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s 1995 hit, “One Sweet Day,” for the record number of weeks at number one. Just two years later, in 2019, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road Remix,” which features Billy Ray Cyrus, later broke the record, spending a total of 19 weeks atop the Hot 100 chart.
Still, the song was a huge moment--especially since it features lyrics in both Spanish and English. Luis Fonsi spoke about the impact of the song and just how special it is back in 2018, when he talked to PEOPLE at the Grammy Awards red carpet.
“The timing is kind of poetic,” he said at the time. “The fact that a Spanish song broke — or tied in this case — the record for No. 1...16 weeks at the Hot 100 in a time where people sort of want to divide and then separate and build walls and things like that. For a song like this to flow to the top, it really is very special.”
