When Four Brave Men Take On Liu Yuning’s “Her” (她) — and Remind Everyone Just How Hard This Song Is | Call Me By Fire 2026
Many of you might have seen this already, but for those who haven’t…
I came across this Call Me By Fire 2026 performance of “Her” (她) and, well… I think we can safely establish that these gentlemen are no-Nings (no offense meant!).
But how could they be?
There is only —— One Ning 😉
Everyone else who decides to sing one of his more difficult songs is already putting themselves in a tough position.
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For the fourth public performance of Call Me By Fire 2026, Xiao Shenyang, Shawn Yue, Li Guangjie and Guo Xiaodong performed Liu Yuning’s “Her,” the opening theme and Luan Nian character song from The Early Spring.
And as it turned out LYN had actually warned Xiao Shenyang beforehand.
Xiao Shenyang contacted him while they were preparing the song and asked for advice. LYN gave him some pointers and told him quite plainly that this song is difficult to sing. The program’s vocal team apparently agreed — its singing difficulty was described as extremely high and demanding of the performer.
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Then the performance aired, and Chinese social media had… opinions.
“Her — sounds bad” (她 难听)
made it onto Weibo’s hot search ! 🤯😆
Guo Xiaodong received much of the criticism over his pitch and breath control. After his elimination, he responded rather graciously, saying he hadn’t dared listen back to the performance yet and thanking people for their tolerance.
Xiao Shenyang, unsurprisingly, was generally singled out as the strongest singer of the four.
I don’t particularly want to berate any of them. They got onstage and attempted a genuinely difficult song. What I find much more interesting is what happened around the performance: people went looking for Liu Yuning’s original.
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Chinese media reported a jump in plays of the original
after the episode aired, while “The original singer of ‘Her’ is Liu Yuning” (她的原唱是刘宇宁) became part of the online discussion.
QQ Music reportedly had more than 15,000 people listening to it simultaneously late at night, while its combined QQ Music and Kugou collections passed 900,000.
And the comments under the MangoTV upload are full of people telling others to go listen to Liu Yuning’s version — including comments specifically pointing out how well he sings it live.
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Which brings me back to why I find the whole thing interesting.
“Her” became iconic remarkably fast.
Part of that is undoubtedly The Early Spring. The hit drama gave the song a huge audience, and it became closely associated with Luan Nian.
Part of it is simply that “Her” is a very good song.
And part of it is Liu Yuning.
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“Her” does not sound effortless when LYN sings it. (again, no offence, boo).
Quite the opposite: you can hear that it is technically demanding. Much of it sits in or repeatedly moves through his head voice / upper register, and the exposed, sustained phrasing requires very good breath support, pitch stability, register control and clean transitions. The difficulty is part of what you hear in his performance — he simply has the technique to execute it (because he is the best 🤷🏻♀️)
That matters when talking about why one particular recording of a song catches fire. A drama can introduce millions of people to an OST, and a great composition gives the singer something worth working with. But the singer still has to make people want to hear it again.
LYN did.
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The song has also traveled well beyond the drama. It has been covered outside China, including by Gyumin of the Korean group XODIAC, and this Call Me By Fire performance has now sent another group of listeners looking for the original.
Not quite the outcome the four gentlemen onstage were hoping for, I imagine.
But I’m not going to be mean to them for proving something their original singer had already warned them about:
“Her” is really bloody hard to sing.
All things considered, apart from one of them who I think should have called in sick 🫣 that day, they all did a solid job with such a difficult song — don’t forget these guys aren’t singers.
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Yours,
NoRecipe ✨
OneNing
