Brooke Lynn Hytes: 5 songs that changed my life

Brooke Lynn Hytes is many things: a world-famous drag queen, the runner-up on Season 11 of RuPaul's Drag Race, a trained dancer, TV host and, most recently, the executive producer of Crave's 1 Queen 5 Queers, the reboot of MTV Canada's early 2000s series 1 Girl 5 Gays. But one thing Hytes admittedly isn't is a pop star. 

Earlier this year, Hytes dropped the club track "Queen of the North," a title she claimed as the first Canadian to ever compete on RuPaul's Drag Race. (She has since taken on the role as the only permanent judge on the Canadian version of the franchise, Canada's Drag Race.) When I bring up the song, wondering what her creative process is as a singer, Hytes falls silent. 

"Honestly," she says, with some hesitation, "it was my manager being like, 'Hey, you're going to do this,' and I was like, 'I don't want to do this.' I'm not a musical person. I don't consider myself to have a good voice. Music is just not my passion." 

Singing and being a pop star, Hytes says, is better suited for someone like Priyanka, the inaugural winner of Canada's Drag Race, whose 2021 EP, Taste Test, blew up this year thanks to the viral success of her single "Come Through." "She's really good at it, and you can tell it's something she wants to do," Hytes notes. 

But to say Hytes isn't musical at all is a lie. As a drag queen, Hytes is constantly performing and lip-syncing to big, bombastic songs, whether they're pop hits or power ballads. On her season of RuPaul's Drag Race, Hytes built up a reputation as a "lip-sync assassin," a contestant whose skills as a performer not only saved her from elimination, but who was feted for delivering some of the show's best numbers. (Assassins are often brought back to battle queens on RuPaul's Drag Race All-Stars, on which Hytes made an appearance for its most recent season.)  

With the second season of Canada's Drag Race wrapping up this week, and 1 Queen 5 Queers' recent premiere (new episodes air weekly on Crave), CBC Music caught up with Brooke Lynn Hytes to look at five songs that changed her life. 

'Sorry Not Sorry,' Demi Lovato

"I did one of the most famous lip-syncs of all time on Drag Race to this song against [Season 11 winner] Yvie Oddly. We were both in the bottom two, and rightfully so. During the lip-sync, you kind of get lost and I kind of blacked out, which is always a sign of a good performance, when you don't remember what happened. But afterwards, the crew and the judges, and everyone, was just clapping. We got this huge round of applause, which doesn't always happen after lip-syncs. That was a song that really turned a lot of stuff around for me, and really blew up in a way I didn't expect it to. I knew it was a good lip-sync, but I didn't know people were going to go as crazy for it as they did. [Demi Lovato] messaged me on Instagram, probably a couple of months after that episode aired. They were like, 'Oh my God, I just saw it. That was incredible.' And we actually hung out a few times; they're really great. But I've retired that number. I never want to hear or do that song again, but it did change my life."

'Partition,' Beyoncé 

"This song is like an old-school standard favourite. That was just one of those songs that kind of defined my drag. It was just one of those songs that I heard and was like, 'Oh, that's my song.' Like that's what I try to emulate in drag: a sex goddess siren. I was like, 'I'm going to do this song for a very long time,' and I still perform it periodically. That song has made me a lot of money. I've had many a five-dollar bill stuffed down my bra to that song." 

'It's All Coming Back to Me Now,' Céline Dion 

'If you come to a drag show and I'm performing, chances are you're going to see this number. I'm really into doing ballads. Everyone knows me as a dancer, but the thing is, I'm getting older and I don't want to dance forever. So I try to do a lot of ballads now because I love power ballads, and I love seeing people perform them really well. For me, it's a lot more difficult than dancing because you can't just rely on tricks and kicks and flips. You have to actually stand there and deliver a really powerful performance, which is harder to do. So [Céline's 'It's All Coming Back to me Now'] is the first ballad I really started performing a lot and it kind of changed my performance style."

On drag queens' connection with Dion: 

"I think she's our diva, you know? And she's a really fun person to impersonate because she's crazy. She's just a little bit of a nut job, and we love it. She's so high energy. Like, Cher is another person a lot of queens impersonate, but Cher doesn't really do a whole lot. But with Céline, you can have a little bit more fun with it. I feel like her music is just so great to perform to. Why wouldn't you want to do her?" 

'Bohemian Rhapsody,' Queen 

"I think one of the first times that I heard [Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody'] was when I performed a ballet called Queen at the Ballet when I was living in South Africa. I played Freddie Mercury's lover and that was the first time I really got into Queen because I was hearing it every single day, and that's probably one of the first times I really heard the song, like actually paid attention to it. That's just one of those songs where you get lost in it. And I like doing that song because it's a high-energy song, but it's not a dance song. You don't have to dance to it. It's just one of those songs where you can really give a lot of emotion." 

'Is it a Crime,' Sade 

"Sade's 'Is It a Crime' is one of my favourite songs. I grew up in the pageant world, and that was a song that I mainly saw beautiful trans women goddesses perform. So I always associated it with these goddesses and I never felt comfortable performing it like, 'Well, I can't do it like they can.' But actually, this summer I did a show on Fire Island. I thought it was a regular Drag Race show, which means two songs and a meet-and-greet so that's what I was prepared for. And probably 20 hours before the show, my friend was like, 'You know this is a one-woman show, right?' They were like, 'It's just you for an hour and a half.' And nobody had told me that. So I had to come up with a one-woman show in like, a day. And I was freaking out, but thought, 'You know what, f--k it.' I'm just going to do a bunch of songs that I've always wanted to do that I've never performed before; I'm just going to do them all. I opened with 'Is This a Crime' by Sade, and I got my absolute life. It was the first time I'd performed it and I've been performing it ever since. It's another song that really defines what I try to do with my drag."