Glen Cove's Shye, 17, wows all four coaches on 'The Voice' blind auditions

When all four coaches’ chairs on "The Voice" spun around at the sound of her singing on Tuesday's "Blind Audition" episode — the musical equivalent of a grand slam home run — Glen Cove native Madison "Shye" Roberts told herself, "I have to keep my composure."

How, when you’re just 17 and Michael Bublé, Reba McEntire, Snoop Dogg and Gwen Stefani all want you on their team for this 26th season of the NBC musical competition? "I just took myself back to the reason I'm there in the first place," the monomial Shye — a stage name based on her middle name, Shyelle — told Newsday. "To put on a good performance and to show them I'm dedicated enough for this."

She completed her song, the soulful "Superman (It's Not Easy)" by John Ondrasik’s one-man band Five for Fighting, and chose crooner Bublé. One consideration, Shye says, was the odds of country star McEntire, last season’s winning coach, winning two years in a row. But also "because of his vocal style — he's very much a storyteller. He has a way of connecting with people, and I felt like he had a lot to teach me in my genre and in general."

Shye, who turns 18 Saturday, has been earning singing honors since her days at Landing Elementary School, Robert Finley Middle School and Glen Cove High School, where she performed in musicals including "In the Heights" and "Miss Saigon" and where teacher Edward Norris encouraged her and helped her win a local music scholarship. Named multiple years to the Nassau Music Educators Association’s roster of All-County musicians, Skye additionally won the Hauppauge-based LGBT Network’s annual LGBT Got Big Talent competition in 2022.

As she explained on "The Voice," she missed her high school graduation in order to perform on night two of this season’s Blind Auditions. For her senior year she had transferred from Glen Cove to The Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, after moving to that city with her mother and stepfather, Sheila Roberts and Michael Creen, who were helping care for a sick family member.

Making that particularly remarkable is that Sheila Roberts is herself on disability, having been injured in 2010 while working as a financial aid counselor on Long Island. "She was just sitting at her desk and a roof fell on her back," Shye explains. This exacerbated her mother’s existing scoliosis and led to multiple surgeries and long hospital stays.

Sheila Roberts had divorced Shye’s father, tech-support worker Giani Zgaljardic, in 2000 and did not remarry until 2019, leaving much of Shye’s day-to-day upbringing to some of Shye’s four much older siblings, aged 28 to 42. There also was "kind of a sixth sibling: My mom raised her eldest daughter's grandchild, who was four or five years older than me, and she kind of became my sister."

She says she sang "Superman (It's Not Easy)" in honor of her mother. "That song kind of got her through some hard times," She says. "She used to listen to it in the hospital while she was getting her surgeries done," adding, "She wanted to be our superhero. With all of her health issues, she put on a brave face for her kids and showed up at every concert, every performance, was there for us emotionally and physically."