Lauren Spencer-Smith

In 2020, 16-year-old Lauren Spencer-Smith became the first ever Canadian resident to reach the Top 20 of America’s Got Talent. Spencer-Smith’s audition, in which she sang ‘What About Us’ by P!nk, saw judges Lionel Ritchie, Katy Perry and Luke Bryan vote unanimously to send her to the next round. But, amazingly, America’s Got Talent wasn’t the precocious Spencer-Smith’s first brush with stardom. At the age of just 11, she entered a radio competition which led her to perform onstage with singer-songwriter and husband of Nicole Kidman Keith Urban at the annual Sunfest festival in Cowichan. In 2019, Spencer-Smith’s father posted a YouTube video of her singing along to Lady Gaga’s Always Remember Us This Way from the movie A Star is Born, which garnered over 19 million views in a matter of weeks. A staffer on the NBC talk show Steve Harvey contacted her after seeing the video and Spencer-Smith was invited on to perform.

Since appearing on America’s Got Talent, Spencer-Smith has released a commercial version of ‘Always Remember Us This Way’ which reached the top 100 on the iTunes charts and gained over 3 million streams on Spotify, Amazon music and Apple music. She was nominated for a Juno Award in 2020 in the Best Adult Contemporary Album category for her debut Unplugged Vol. 1, with superstar Bryan Adams being a fellow nominee.