Love Quote by Haley Reinhart

Reinhart’s taste map is also a positioning statement: classic rock and rock and roll are “top notch” not just as genres, but as a stamp of legitimacy in a pop landscape where “authenticity” gets treated like a scarce resource. Coming up through American Idol and a YouTube-era attention economy, she’s been placed in a system that rewards versatility but often flattens artists into marketable types. Naming classic rock first is a refusal of that flattening: it signals craft, grit, and lineage.

The phrasing is tellingly unsentimental. “Top notch” is blunt, almost blue-collar praise - not reverent, not precious. She’s not building a museum around the past; she’s claiming it as a working standard. Then she pivots to “soul - bluesy music as well,” where the hyphen does quiet connective tissue work. She’s sketching a continuum rather than a playlist: rock as an outgrowth of blues and soul, voice as the throughline. For a singer known for a big, expressive instrument, “bluesy” isn’t a vibe so much as a technique - phrasing, rasp, swing, emotional specificity.

There’s also a subtle cultural negotiation here. When contemporary artists cite older Black-rooted forms, it can read like borrowed cool. Reinhart sidesteps that by framing the music as formative, not decorative: these are the sources that make her singing make sense. The intent isn’t nostalgia; it’s credibility through ancestry, a way of telling you what she’s trying to protect in her sound as trends churn.