Amityville's Dan Kiernan advances to next round on 'The Voice'

Amityville’s Dan Kiernan performed on the NBC singing competition “The Voice” Monday night, winning his Battle Round segment in a one-to-one matchup with fellow Kelsea Ballerini team-member Jessica Manalo.

In a montage segment about 96 minutes into the episode, the proudly gay Kiernan, 34, duetted on Chappell Roan’s 2024 power-pop ballad “Good Luck, Babe!,” which as written is about a woman chiding another for denying their same-sex attraction.

Transposed to a male singer, “The representation of getting to sing a song on national television about kissing boys really meant a lot,” Kiernan told Newsday Tuesday, “Getting to sing as a queer artist, getting to sing with [teammate Manalo], who's a queer artist, it really was about having this moment that felt bigger than what we're doing in the competition.”

When he and Manolo were given the song to perform, Kiernan said, “We knew we had to do it justice and we knew how important it would be. So we rehearsed together every day. We had all our meals together. We really have become incredibly close friends, and they didn't show it, but at the end of the song we held hands and hugged. I accidentally knocked her hat off and put it back on!”

Ballerini praised Kiernan on air. “Dan, my man!” the country-music star exclaimed. “In this song when you push and you get to that cool part of your voice where that vibrato comes out and that texture comes out, it’s so yummy.”

After declaring him the winner, she went on to tell the camera, “I love that Dan’s voice is so dynamic. I’m along for the ride. I’m very much so on the Dan train,” she said, making a train-whistle hand gesture and the sound “Boop-boop!”
Kiernan now moves on to the Knockouts Round, which commence on March 31.

A wedding singer professionally, who also has performed at such Manhattan venues as The Bitter End, The Bowery Electric and Sony Hall and regularly at gay-pride festivals, Kiernan since 2022 has produced a regular showcase, the New York City Queer Music Festival, at the Brooklyn club 3 Dollar Bill.

On the “Voice” season-27 premiere on Feb. 3, his rendition of “High Hopes” by the emo-punk group Panic! At the Disco earned him a recruitment buzzer from two of the show’s four coach / mentors, Michael Bublé and John Legend. But as fellow coach Adam Levine looked on, Ballerini used a new maneuver this season, Coach Replay, to retroactively recruit him.

Born in West Islip and raised in Amityville, Kiernan is the younger of two sons of the late James Kiernan and Helen Kiernan, now the clinical competency coordinator at Freeport’s Meadowbrook Care Center. And the Battle Round, he said, gave him one more connection to his father.

“It was filmed on the five-year anniversary of my dad passing” on Aug. 31, 2019, he said. “So winning that day was a very emotional time. I called my mom after, and it felt like it kind of reclaimed what was a sad day and a sad time in our family's life. It’s now, ‘That's the time I won my battle.' So I really felt like I had my guardian angels with me that day.”