Lauryn Hill Performs ‘Feeling Good’ On Fallon

Hill plays it safe until the middle of the song, where she takes off on a flight of joyous vocal runs, emoting like a woman transformed.

The 40-year-old performer sang with as much passion and vigor as the late singer Nina Simone and left many of us who watched from home yelling, “Sing Lauryn!”

The rocky decade following Unplugged 2.0, Hill’s quixotic acoustic follow-up to the multiplatinum Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, found the artist sliding away from the public eye and refusing to pay taxes, a self-prescribed political act nearly undone by a quirky deal to settle her debts in exchange for recording a new album. Like D’angelo, Hill retreated after rising too far too fast.

In addition to “Feeling Good”, Simone contributed six covers total to the album including “Ne Me Quitte Pas”, “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” “Wild Is the Wind”, “African Mailman”, and “I’ve Got Life” as well as an interpolation of “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life”. And this month the album “Nina Revisited” was released in her honor, featuring Lauryn Hill, Usher and Mary J Blige.

Hill did perform The Beatles’ “Something” on “The Late Show with David Letterman” last year during the show’s weeklong tribute to the band’s 50th anniversary on “The Ed Sullivan Show”.

In their coverage of the “Feeling Good” performance Rolling Stone reported that Lauryn Hill has always held Nina Simone as an idol.

Hill’s performance of “Feeling Good” is one that will undeniably be talked about for years to come.