The Voice: Artists Tease Exciting New Season

For a show that’s essentially the same year in and year out, The Voice can be amazingly diverse.

Last week, the first nineteen artists who advanced on the blind auditions spoke with reporters about the experience, their hopes for the competition, how they got to this point, and the dreaded coaching decision.

There were a lot of voices, and they didn’t all get a moment in the spotlight, but from those who did, Blind Joe was one of the standouts. Joe, who stressed that he didn’t mind being called Blind Joe, as that’s what everyone called him growing up, was especially candid when the talked about the fact that the nerves didn’t go away from him when he finished singing, because he couldn’t see how many chairs had turned! Once Blake told him he’d gotten a four chair turn, then Blind Joe had a chance to relax.

Because yes, they all agreed, getting up there was hard – experience or no experience.

For every experienced performer that gets up on The Voice stage, there’s a Siahna Im. Fifteen years old, she writes her own music and had Gwen Stefani turning around after just a few notes. She stated, “I put myself in someone else’s shoes and tried to tell their story on the stage.” She didn’t get a four-chair turn — Adam Levine refrained. Remember Siahna Im’s name, because whether it’s in this competition or not, this girl is going places.

And the journey is just beginning. Kota Wade, from Team Gwen, probably summoned up everyone’s feelings when he talked about what a crazy journey The Voice was – not only on the auditioning front, but also with the response they’ve gotten from fans and the media in general.

When pressed for advice for young emerging artists, these people had a hard time shedding their image of themselves as these struggling performers enough to give a response. Jordan Smith, a Team Adam contestant truly summoned up best when he said: “Don’t be afraid to be yourself. Do what you do, and what you love, and don’t try to fit someone else’s standards. And yet never stop trying to learn and grow and become better.”

That’s the kind of advice that will work in any aspect of life.

One wouldn’t expect such a sense of camaraderie from people who are, essentially, competing against each other, but as Nadjah Nicole, an unlikely Team Blake contestant made it clear, they’re just a community. No one else can really understand what they’re going through.

Barrett Baber, another Team Blake contestant, explained it like this: “One thing I learned from the show, not necessarily just the audition itself but from being in the presence of so many fantastic singers and artists is that it’s just the power of music as a shared experience kind of thing that, you know, there’s so many of it and we’re so different and so unique.”

It’s nice to know that the artists are really and truly supportive in the background.

Finally, on the subject of how hard it was to actually pick a coach, everyone agreed that even if you make up your mind beforehand (and they all sort of do), when the coaches start talking, it’s a whole different ballgame.

Evan McKeel, from Team Pharrell said, “I changed my mind about five or six different times in the process leading up to my audition in terms of who I wanted to be my Coach if I had the choice and I probably changed it about five or six more times when I was up on stage.”

James Dupre, especially, had to field a lot of questions about being a country artist and choosing to go with someone other than Blake, a decision that’s backfired on just about every country artist who’s ever attempted it. Of course, his reasoning make sense; he’d rather stand out as the only country artist in Adam’s team that be one of many on Blake’s team.

Either way, with just one week down, this already seems like it’s going to be an exciting season of The Voice. The coaches are fighting tooth and nail, the talent is off-the-charts, and, of course, Carson Daly is still the best cheerleader in show-business.

The Voice airs Mondays at 8/7c and Tuesdays at 9/8c on NBC.