Idol Chatter & Voice Views

His audition: Shawn Smith, 32, of Utica, N.Y., sang the Zac Brown Band’s “Chicken Fried.” He was well into the performance, before Cee Lo Green turned his chair. At the time, Cee Lo was the only coach with a spot left on his team. He also impressed Blake Shelton with his willingness to ham it up for the audience.

Background: He’s an Army vet who says some people call him “Big Sexy.” He’s also a singing bartender, who calls music “my release.” As for the Army, he enlisted in 2000 and found himself serving in Iraq in November 2007 when he ran over explosives while on a convoy. He wound up with a concussion and a serious loss of hearing in his right ear. “That was just something that drove me more to be better,” he told The Voice. On The Voice stage he even showed off a belt buckle that reads Big Sexy.

On being on Team Cee Lo: “Cee Lo is a unique man. He’s an entertainer, along with being a musician and a great artist. I feel like he’s going to give me an opportunity to be myself, and not try to change me or mold me into somebody else who I’m not.”

What the show didn’t show: Shawn isn’t just a singing bartender. He performs in a six-piece band called Showtime that headlined Rocktoberfest in Oneonta, N.Y., the first weekend in October and performs rock, pop and R&B music. And he and Justin Smithson make up a two-man acoustic band called Poor Tim that performs everything from the music of Dave Matthews and John Mayer to Chicago and the Doobie Brothers. The twosome “kind of started as a fluke,” Smithson says in this video. “Shawn was a waiter in Old Forge, N.Y., and I was playing in a band. He came through and said, ‘Give me your guitar; let me play.'” Smithson did, was impressed “and we’ve been together ever since.” In his Voice video, Shawn admits he’d never watched The Voice. Smithson told CNYCentral.com the owner of a tavern in Utica signed Shawn up for an audition and convinced him to do it. Said Shawn the day after his audition aired: “I gig out anywhere from four to five nights a week. I’m a working musician. I like being in front of an audience and the center of attention. It’s kind of like my thing. I feel like it’s just — that’s where I belong in life.” As for the nickname? Shawn said it dates all the way back to 1990 and was given to him by a girlfriend in college. “It’s just something that stuck,” he said. “And now it won’t ever go away.”

Quote: As an Army vet, Shawn said the bridge to his audition song — which includes the lines “salute the ones who died / the ones who gave their lives” — means the most to him. “And that’s when I got the chair to turn around. It was like a storybook ending for me.”

On iTunes: The studio version of his audition song.

Keeping up with Shawn: On Twitter — @ShawnBigSexy — Facebook

For profiles of other Season 5 contestants, go here.

Shawn Smith, “Plush” cover

Shawn Smith, “Home” cover