“I’ve always loved this song because it paints such a vivid picture with nonchalantly genius wordplay,” Lexa Gates tells Apple Music about Amy Winehouse’s “I Heard Love Is Blind.” The Queens-based singer and rapper particularly remembers her reaction to the final line of the track, taken from the late singer’s debut album, Frank: “This ain’t infidelity/It’s not cheating/You were on my mind/Yes, he looked like you/But I heard love is blind.” “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Damn,’” Gates recalls. “The way someone would react to hearing a crazy rap bar.” For Gates, the song perfectly exemplifies what you might consider a road less traveled when it comes to a woman’s power: “In this song, Amy is the villain, which is a pretty bold thing for a woman to be,” she says. Her own voice has been compared to Winehouse’s, which is no surprise considering her warm, velvety cover of the 2003 track. Along with Winehouse, Gates acknowledges her admiration for other women artists paving their own paths: “Nicki Minaj, because she didn’t accept that pickle water; Alicia Keys, because she moves with so much love; and Erykah Badu, because she’s not afraid to be who she is even if it doesn’t fit the mainstream narrative.”