Singer finds her team on ‘Voice’
Erika Zade, 20, of Pembroke Pines, wows Kelly Clarkson on show.
There’s a “Voice” from South Florida competing on NBC’s popular singing reality show.
That’s Erika
Zade, 20, of Pembroke Pines, who was picked by
Kelly Clarkson to compete on her team this season.
Zade, a sophomore at Berklee College of Music in Boston, said she grew up listening “to a lot of Selena and a lot of country music,” including the Dixie Chicks.
“And my family were big on Fleetwood Mac,” she added during a conference call.
She cited her father who gave her first guitar “as a huge musical influence” who would take her to Little Havana’s Calle Ocho to listen to music.
The Cuban-American is also a songwriter who developed her craft through the National Young-Arts Foundation, a Miami program for emerging artists ages 15 to 18.
For the blind audition rounds this week, on “The Voice,” Zade performed “New Rules” by Dua Lipa.
The blind auditions require that contestants sing without the judges initially seeing them.
If any of the four judges — Clarkson, Adam Levine, Jennifer Hudson and Blake Shelton — like what they hear, they press a button and their red chair swivels around to meet the hopeful singers.
Zade wowed Clarkson, the only judge to hit her button.
“Your voice is so like, literally, you are perfectly on key all the time. It’s insane,” Clarkson said.
The other judges also praised Zade.
“You have a very very very very incredible voice and it’s very modern,” Levine said. “You could literally, tomorrow, have a huge song on the radio.”
Said Hudson, “I love love love loved your voice and it’s so unique. You got depth, you got range, attitude, presence.”
In a funny twist after the performance, Zade told Shelton that she had met him before.
“I met you when I was like, 11 years old, at CMA Fest, and I gave you, like, a demo CD,” she told Shelton. “And you, like, signed it and gave it to another fan.”