The singer-songwriter lost her hearing when she was 18.
Mandy Harvey continues to impress the America's Got Talent judges!
The singer-songwriter returned to the stage Tuesday night with a gorgeous original song called "Release Me" for her semi-final's performance. When Harvey was 18, she began to lose her hearing due to a connective tissue disorder, but she has embraced this unexpected life change in the best way possible.
"When you lose your hearing, you pay so much more attention to everything around you," Harvey said in a clip shown before her performance. "Now, there's so much for me to look at, all of that busyness and chaos. You're trying to pay attention to everything all at once, and it's just overwhelming. So I like to go to my happy place, where I can just close my eyes and clear the world away."
Following her song, Simon Cowell, Mel B and Heidi Klum gave Harvey a standing ovation.
"That was incredible," Cowell immediately said. "The vocal, the song, the delivery, the performance was about as good as I've ever seen or heard on one of these shows. It was honestly breathtaking. I'm gonna say this because I think other people are going to be thinking this: This reminds me of the first time I ever heard Adele sing, and I remember thinking, 'This girl is gonna be a star.' And that’s exactly how I just felt."
Howie Mandel told Harvey that she "transcend hearing, and it's because of what you do. When you're singing and when we watch you perform, we kind of feel you and you move us emotionally, and you move us with the heart."
"That is more powerful than hearing a great tune, and you make music more powerful than it is," he shared.
Meanwhile, Mel B praised Harvey's "powerful" performance, and Klum stated that this was her "best performance yet" and loved how she included sign language while she was singing.
After the show, Harvey admitted to ET's Denny Directo that she felt "amazing."
"I got to introduce signing with song for the first time on the AGT stage, and that meant a lot to me, and I got to sing an original song again on the Dolby Theater," she said. "I mean, life is beautiful right now."
"I'm presenting a song that's very heartfelt and very raw, so stripping it down so that you can hear all the words or see the signs without too much distraction meant a lot for the meaning of the song, so I'm happy that it was received as well," she added.
Being compared to Adele is truly an honor, though Harvey, unfortunately, wasn't fully aware of just how special Cowell's comments were. "It's crazy. I've never heard Adele sing, so it's a difficult comparison for me, but you can't not know Adele. She's Adele!" she said. "I hope that if she sees the video and hears me sing, she's not offended by that comparison."
And while plenty people have had some harsh words for Cowell in the past, Harvey is not one of them.
"Simon is wonderful because he's listening to my musicianship," she explained. "He's not trying to get caught up in a pity story, which I don't feel that I am one, but some people would put me in that category. He's listening to me as a musician and judging me that way. Regardless of what happens, the fact that he's looking at me straight on as a singer means the world, because I want that judgment."
To see if Harvey makes it into the finals, tune in to the America's Got Talent results show on Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on NBC.
For more AGT, watch below!