Glen Cove teen singer Shye wins her Battle Round on 'The Voice,' advances to Knockouts
Glen Cove-raised Madison “Shye” Roberts bested Jamison Puckett Monday night in her first Battle Round duet on “The Voice,” keeping her on coach Michael Bublé’s team as she progresses on the NBC singing competition.
She felt “relief with a little bit of sadness,” she told Newsday the following day, “because I really didn't want to see him leave and I feel like there was so much more for him in the competition. So I felt bad for being the one who he got sent home on, but at the same time I was extremely relieved that I could go on in the competition. Jamison was, like, ‘This is a win-win: Either I would have won and gotten further through or I won because I get to go home and see my wife and my baby that's going to be born soon.’ So he was not super upset over his loss.”
Shye, who turned 18 on Oct. 12, and Memphis, Tennessee’s Puckett, 34, a fellow member of Team Bublé, had performed the 2015 Justin Bieber hit “Love Yourself,” written by Bieber, Benjamin Levin and Ed Sheeran. Exuding mutual respect and comfort with each other and with the stage — “The camaraderie was just excellent,” coach Reba McEntire noted afterward — they gave each other a long hug when crooner Bublé chose Shye.
“Shye, you killed it,” Bublé told her on the air, later saying in an insert, “It was tough seeing Jamison go” but “I see Shye having a ton of potential because she just has that special of a voice. Honestly, I hear Adele. She just … blew me away. I think she has a great future in this business.”
Bublé had chosen the song, she said, since “it was a chill song that both me and Jamison could kind of vibe to. But it was also a little bit difficult because it's hard to make such a chill song impressive yet tasteful” — the latter a concern because the lyrics are generally interpreted as dissing an ex-girlfriend. “Jamison and I are both in happy relationships,” so in order to interpret it soulfully “we created a storyline in our heads like ‘Let's pretend that there’s this one person, it doesn't have to be a girlfriend but someone we don't like specifically,’ so that it seems almost like we're having a conversation.”
She adds, “It was kind of fun to create a story process that we could connect to and play into.”
Part of this “method singing” comes from growing up in Glen Cove, where she attended Landing Elementary School, Robert Finley Middle School and Glen Cove High School, earning singing honors and starring in school productions of “In the Heights,” “Miss Saigon” and other musicals.
“Theater was one of my biggest outlets growing up,” she says. “Theater helps me on my acting skills and I also have a good time and have fun with my friends” in productions. Shye in her senior year transferred to the Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, when her family relocated to that city. She graduated this year.
Five-time Grammy Award winner Bublé, a new “Voice” coach this season, “really treats me like a colleague,” Shye says, “even though I am nowhere near where he is in his career. At the same time, I feel like he's passing on knowledge to me that he's learned over years of wisdom in life but not just in a teacher sense … [and] more like ‘I recognize your strengths and now I'm ready to help you with your weaknesses’ as a friend. Even though he’s someone super high up [in the music industry], he doesn't act that way.”
Now it’s off to the Knockout Rounds.