When a 10-year-old walks onto the Sweden’s Got Talent stage and delivers a performance that goes on to win the whole competition, you know something special is happening.
Zara Larsson’s audition of The Greatest Love of All is a masterclass in what natural ability combined with early training can produce, and there’s a lot we can unpack from a vocal technique standpoint. In this breakdown, we’ll walk through the key vocal moments, what’s working beautifully, and what you can take away for your own singing.
Singing in a second language: hats off to Zara Larsson
One of the first things worth noting is that Zara Larsson, a Swedish child, is singing The Greatest Love of All in English on national television. Swedish singers are often incredible with language, and pronunciation is not something we can critique here. She’s a kid doing something extraordinary, and her clarity in a second language is impressive on its own.
Working with a young larynx on The Greatest Love of All
Children’s voices come with real anatomical limits, and Zara Larsson is navigating them beautifully. The little larynx naturally struggles to drop low, which is very standard for young singers. Their vocal folds are tiny, which makes reaching lower pitches genuinely difficult.
A few things to keep in mind when thinking about laryngeal position:
- Children have very small vocal folds, so lower notes will always be a challenge
- Anyone past puberty can train a slightly lower larynx position
- Think about laughter, or imagine being a bit of a cow (not pretty, but effective), to bring the larynx down
- Lowering the larynx helps introduce a touch of breath into the tone
Vibrato and thyroid tilt
There’s a lovely moment in The Greatest Love of All where we hear a bit of vibrato coming in to ease the voice. The vibrato is quite wide, which is very likely a sound Zara Larsson picked up from other singers, since children are famously great imitators. It may have been put on a little, but what’s more important is what it tells us about her technique.
There’s a lovely amount of thyroid tilt happening, and thyroid tilt is exactly what we need for vibrato to actually be activated. Without that tilt, vibrato can’t function properly.
Subglottic pressure and body energy
As Zara Larsson climbs higher into the song, you can literally see her little body getting more energized. She’s instinctively building subglottic pressure, meaning the pressure below the vocal folds, by adding tension and engagement through her frame. Her arm lifts, her torso activates, and the sound gets bigger.
This is a fantastic lesson for anyone singing The Greatest Love of All or any belt song. As you climb in range, you want:
- An increase in body energy, not a grip in the abs
- Engagement through the larger back muscles
- An upward lift in the pecs and upper back
- A sense of pressurizing the chamber inside the lungs
That’s what lets the voice ride the higher notes with power instead of strain.
Those gorgeous short sharp breaths
One of the best takeaways from Zara Larsson’s performance is the way she breathes between phrases. Those little audible, sharp, high breaths are actually great technique for singing up in belt or thick fold quality.
When you’re singing high, you don’t need a huge amount of air. Too much air actually ruins the pressurization happening in the lungs. Short, high breaths keep the upper pecs and upper back activated and keep you locked in for the next phrase.
You can hear a tiny bit of throat closure in those in-breaths, but remember that a child’s throat is genuinely tiny, so some of that sound is simply anatomy.
Breath control and stamina
Toward the end of a long phrase in The Greatest Love of All, you can see Zara Larsson go slightly red and clearly push to sustain. That’s very typical for a child singer, because children simply can’t hold incredibly long phrases the way adults can. It’s not a flaw in her technique, it’s just the reality of a developing body. Please, nobody come in with counterexamples. After many years of teaching kids, this is the pattern.
Why children are natural belters
Here’s one of the most interesting points about The Greatest Love of All and Zara Larsson’s delivery of it. Children come out of the womb belting. Belting is one of the loudest qualities the voice can produce, and it’s designed to carry across distances so that caregivers respond. Babies can belt for hours because they need to be heard.
What usually happens as we grow up:
- Someone tells us to quiet down
- We stop using those belt muscles
- The muscles weaken from disuse
- As adults, the larynx grows larger and life adds extra layers of tension
- Belting starts to feel hard, scary, or impossible
The good news is that essentially anyone can learn to belt safely. It isn’t a yell, and it doesn’t have to hurt. With the right approach, the belt comes back.
Talent plus training equals Zara Larsson
Natural talent only takes a singer so far. Zara Larsson at 10 already sounded like she’d had solid guidance, or was blessed with extraordinary instinct, or more likely both. What’s made her the artist she is today isn’t just that early spark.
It’s years of continued training, hard work, and determination on top of that foundation. If she’d simply stopped after this audition, she’d likely be an average singer by now. Instead, The Greatest Love of All was just the beginning.
If you want to learn more about how you can learn to implement these singing techniques into your own voice, let’s sit down for a chat and discuss if the vocal academy is the right fit for you. You can join us here.