Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Kennedy Holmes is embraced by her coach Jennifer Hudson after advancing on The Voice Tuesday night. (NBC Photo)

But it took an instant save for her to do it.

Kennedy Holmes, who just turned 14 in the past week, has been considered one of the show’s front-runners since turning four chairs during the blind auditions.

But after Kirk Jay, Chevel Shepherd and Chris Kroeze were announced as Season 15 finalists based on fan voting, Kennedy’s Voice future was in jeopardy.

The wound up in the middle of the pack, singing with MaKenzie Thomas and Reagan Strange for the save after Sarah Grace and Kymberli Joye went home as the lowest finishers in the overnight voting.

Her’s how the save songs played out.

MaKenzie Thomas, “Over the Mountain” — This performance included a few more vocal frills — like run after run after run — than I prefer. But MaKenzie was generally in top vocal form in one of her better performances of the competition. She showed off great range and, more impressively, tons of soul. Overall, very nicely done. Grade: A–

Reagan Strange, “Wherever You Will Go” — The less said about this performance the better. Except the trepidation on Reagan’s face at the start of the performance will do nothing to quell rumors that anxiety was part of the “under the weather” symptoms that kept Reagan from performing last week. Near the end, she sorta found her footing, demonstrating a nice tone. Grade: D+

Kennedy Holmes, “How Do I Live” — Truth be told, this was far from Kennedy’s best vocal. She strayed off pitch several times and sounded more 14 than she ever sounded 13 prior to her birthday. I’m blaming the pressure-packed end of show format. I also wasn’t crazy about the song choice. Grade: C+

Gotta confess, even though I thought MaKenzie turned in the better save performance, I was rooting for Kennedy to get the save. She’d simply delivered more of those special finalist-quality moments over the course of the competition.

Fans came through. When NBC took down the graphic, Kennedy had 49 percent of the Twitter save vote to 37 percent for MaKenzie and 14 percent for Reagan.

I’ve also gotta confess that I thought Reagan might squeeze her way into the finals in spite of a series of subpar performances and last week’s results show controversy.

Remember, she was the show’s top streamed artists during the first two weeks of Apple Music voting, had a strong showing on iTunes after Monday’s show and entered the save window with more Twitter followers than anyone in the Top 8.

See also
Photo gallery from Tuesday
Song by song grades for the Top 8
iTunes results for the Top 8