Before Christian Gates had originals worth millions of streams, he had covers. Under the handle ItsLuxCity, he built his first audience the old-fashioned new way: a phone, a voice, and other people’s songs, reworked until they sounded like his.
The covers
The feed ranged from Beyoncé’s “Halo,” run through vocal effects, to the Plain White T’s 2006 hit “Hey There Delilah,” each stripped down to voice and feeling. They were not karaoke; they were reinterpretations, familiar songs bent into something moodier and darker by his raspy tone. A cover is a smart move for a new artist: you borrow a song people already love, and use it to show them something they have never heard, your voice.
A producer in the making
He also pulled back the curtain, sharing how he built Billie-Eilish-style vocals in FL Studio. That is the real tell. Even in the covers era, Gates was already a writer, producer and engineer, not just a singer, learning the exact tools he would later use to own his own records. Every cover was also a lesson in production, done in public.
He learned the craft in public, one cover at a time.
Building the trust
The strategy worked because it compounded. Each cover brought new listeners; the vocal experiments kept them; the producer tutorials made them feel let in on the process. By the time originals arrived, there was a real relationship, an audience that felt like it had watched him get good, not one that discovered a finished star.
The bridge to the originals
The covers built the trust; the originals cashed it in. By the time NUMB arrived and eventually went Gold, the audience was already there, waiting. It is the quiet, unglamorous foundation under everything that came after. Full story in the wiki.