The Daly show
Host of The Voice tracks its unlikely rise to the top
THE VOICE Season premiere Monday, 8 p.m., CTV Two/NBC
At first, Carson Daly wanted nothing to do with The Voice.
It was a funny thing, though, he recalled earlier this year, while taking time out from his recording schedule to talk to a visiting writer from Postmedia News: Neither did Blake Shelton, Adam Levine or any of the other professional music artists who, at the time, would unwittingly play a part in The Voice’s rapid rise to the top of the ratings charts.
As The Voice sets the stage for its fourth season with returning mentors Levine and Shelton and new mentors Shakira and Usher, replacing the departed Cee Lo Green and Christina Aguilera, Daly is calm yet tightly wound in anticipation of a season he believes will introduce a new audience to vocal performers they might otherwise never have heard.
Daly is quiet and soft-spoken as he talks about how The Voice has turned the music industry on its ear, but don’t mistake that vibe for casual detachedness. Daly, the 39-year-old host of the late-night talk show Last Call With Carson Daly and host of NBC’s annual celebration New Year’s Eve With Carson Daly, says he had little time “for those other shows” when he first heard about The Voice.
And that wasn’t all. The last thing Levine, the lead singer of Maroon 5, wanted or needed, Daly suggested, was to become a running punchline to a joke about reality TV singing competitions. And that went double for Shelton, the 2012 Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year; Aguilera, dubbed the “blue-eyed soul singer” and “voice of a generation;” and Green, the 2012 double Grammy winner and R&B performer, record producer and hip-hop impresario.
The entertainment media have worked themselves into a frenzy over how Shakira and Usher will fit into the program’s vocal mix, but Daly suggests the media have it backwards.
The Voice was never about the stars, he says.
It’s about the singing contestants — and that one-in-a-million voice that stops you dead in your tracks and makes your heart skip a beat when you first hear it on the radio.
That’s what drew him to the program in the first place, and what attracted Shelton, Levine and now Shakira and Usher.
Daly had little interest in performing in front of the camera like a trained seal as the host of a reality TV competition; he already has his nighttime talk show to worry about.
The Voice has touched a nerve with a young, educated, upwardly mobile, fast-growing following precisely because it has a casual, “Who cares?” attitude toward stars and stardom.
When Daly agreed to sign on, he felt the program’s vibe — but he never believed it would catch on the way it has.
“We knew the juxtaposition of having famous musicians and then shifting the power to the contestant would be an interesting dynamic,” Daly recalled.
The Voice is unique in that, during the initial auditions phase, the contestants choose who among the mentors they think is best for them.
“With so many of these shows, the viewer sees the performer perform and then somebody high and mighty, sitting there in their chair, goes: ‘You’re worthy. You’re not worthy.’ Almost like at the gates of heaven.’ You can come in. You can’t come in.’
“We never believed that talent can be found like that, or even should be found like that.
“We found four people who were relevant, who had done big things in music, who respect each other and who want to help people.
“The Voice was about us as producers putting really great talent in front of them and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think, what can you do to really help them?’”
Daly considers himself wellversed musically, but the program has introduced him to artists he says left him frankly “blown away,” that he otherwise might not have heard except by accident.
The same is true, he suspects, of many of the viewers who tuned in to The Voice each week and made it not just a TV ratings hit but a cultural phenomenon.
Daly became emotionally invested in many of the performers last season — hosts who insist they remain objective and above the fray are either lying, deluding themselves or frankly clueless, he says with disarming candour — and he freely admits the singers who grab him the most are the creative, unusual artists.
Cassadee Pope, last season’s winner, is exceedingly talented, with a one-of-a-kind voice and keen musical ear, he says, but it was the weird, strangely out-of-the-box artists such as gruff, Saint Paul, Minn., folksinger Nicholas David Mrozinski, a.k.a. Nicholas David, and 16-year-old soul diva Melanie Martinez who jumped out at Daly as being the genuine article.