Follow Your Dreams?

The Voice concluded this past week with Javier Colon grabbing the top final vote over Dia Frampton who had the most downloads of her original song performed on the show’s final performance show.
I ended up liking The Voice, obviously since I watched all of the episodes. I would hope for a couple of tweaks in it for next season, which begins in September but for a first season it was fine.
One of the odd things I saw on the show was a final-show performance by the judges/entertainers Christina Aquilera, Adam Levine, Blake Shelton and Cee Lo Green.
While all of them are certainly fine entertainers and great singers (well Cee Lo isn’t really that great a singer, although he has a great stage presence) their voices shouldn’t necessarily have been mixed together in a song. They simply didn’t blend at all since they were all so unique. It really sounded bad.

But, the judges did all sing with their finalist and that worked out a whole lot better. Beverly McClellan singing with Aguilera on her own song “Beautiful” was fantastic. Even though I am not a fan of Michael Jackson’s music hearing Levine and Colon sing “Man in the Mirror” was well done also.

I hadn’t done any research into the show during the season though. I later found out that Colon had already cut at least two albums with Capitol Records and recently released another album. McClellan has two albums for download on her MySpace page although she is apparently unsigned.
Frampton had been part of a band with her sister Meg (The Meg & Dia Band) and released an album through Warner Bros. Records in 2007 before being dropped in 2010.
Vicci Martinez, the other of the final four on the show, has recorded 8 albums (six are listed on her official page) although it seems as if they are all independent. She had a successful American Idol audition and was invited to advance to a second round in the first season, but thought the contract was too restrictive.

It was rather obvious after a while that the four finalists were very talented. But it wasn’t like any of them were undiscovered talents, although arguably Martinez since she has never been signed was a relative unknown.
The show sort of made it seem like all of these competitors were just rank amateurs who came off of the street with a dream and such wasn’t the case. Colon, for example, worked with Darius Booker and even Martinez shared a venue with Sting, Annie Lennox and Avril Levine at some point in her young career.

That’s all fine if its known in advance. But if your co-worker in the stock room says that he going to try out for The Voice next season and has never been on stage or in front of a microphone, let him know what his chances of success are going to be. And seriously, unless you want to play a practical joke on him, don’t encourage him to follow that particular dream without a whole series of caveats.

I have heard rumors that American Idol is like that also, but have yet to find much proof of that. There seems to be more of a chance that a regular, amateur singer can actually get in front of the judges to audition; at least more so than The Voice.

The one main exception to this was the 16-year old Xenia, who made the final eight on The Voice. She literally had zero professional experience yet made it to that final eight (with a big lift from Shelton, her coach) and believed that most people in her own high school wouldn’t have known that she was singer.

The more I watch America’s Got Talent the more I appreciate it since people of all ages are eligible (The Voice is too, I should add, but AGT features other acts also.) There was a great example of this on this past week’s show when 42-year old Cindy Chang had a Susan Boyle moment and was instantly embraced by the judges and the audience.

Now I know some of this gets staged as well. Everyone is pre-judged before they get to the main judges. That’s all fine. The production staff knows in advance who they are putting on stage and why. But people like Cindy Chang literally did not have a singing career at all and was able to be discovered on this show.
Chang’s performance was inspiring since it was her own parents who kept her from trying to become a singer. In her 20’s she started taking voice lessons though and then made her move to take this chance this past week (or whenever it actually happened.)
She was overcome with emotion, crying and shaking on stage after she gave her operatic performance in response to the overwhelming positive response she received from the crowd.
If you haven’t seen and heard it, it’s easily found by searching her name online. It will blow you away that this was the first time any of us have ever heard of her.

Done.

Entries here might be a little fewer and farther between for a while. I am in the early stages of writing my first real book now.

I have notes all over the place from books I have wanted to write. This one though is about Comedy Hypnosis so it’s a whole lot different from the fantasy books I have started and stopped a dozen times or so.

Hopefully I will finish this one and relatively soon. Since it is a how-to book it won’t have general appeal but I have been asked a few dozen times if I have training material. I do train people, but I do so in person. I need my own training process and lessons learned from experience written down to handle those requests from people who would rather just read the book.