“At the end of the day I just figured the academy was not going to be progressive enough,” says Elizabeth Myers, our 2017 Grammy Awards predictions contest winner (see our leaderboard here), about how she knew Adele was going to win Album of the Year for “25,” upsetting Beyonce‘s “Lemonade.” Watch our video chat with Myers above.
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“As much as I really like Adele’s album it was a bit of a safer choice in terms of who the voters were,” Myers adds. “The only thing that made me nervous about it was again predicting her to sweep those top three awards again. I was unsure about that, but I decided to just go with it, and it paid off.” One category where she wavered was Song of the Year, the only general field category Beyonce has ever won (for “Single Ladies” in 2010), but she stuck to her guns and ended up correctly predicting all four general-field categories: Record, Song and Album to Adele, and Best New Artist to Chance the Rapper.
2017 Grammy Awards: Full list of winners in all 84 categories
Also among her savvy predictions were Solange for Best R&B Performance (“Cranes in the Sky”), Maxwell for Best R&B Song (“Lake by the Ocean”) and Chance the Rapper for Best Rap Album (“Coloring Book”) — none of those were the predicted favorites. But she’s not without regret. If she had followed her instincts she also would have gotten Best Rock Album right: “One of the changes I was going to make,” she explains, “was from Weezer to [the eventual winner] Cage the Elephant, so that one I was really bummed about.”
