Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Chloe Kohanski, winner of The Voice Season 13. (NBC Photo)

It happened at the end of her Team Miley Cyrus knockout round match with Ashland Craft.

And Chloe admits she wasn’t prepared for it and hadn’t planned for it.

She was performing Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” that day. It was a song she had chosen, a song she had confidence in.

“I’m standing up there (after singing) and I’m thinking, ‘Yeh, I got this,'” Chloe recalled. “And then Miley’s like, ‘No, you don’t.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, whoa, that was short.’ That was not the experience I thought I was going to have.”

Miley had just declared Ashland the winner, and Chloe thought her time on the show was over.

Then Blake Shelton and Jennifer Hudson pushed their steal buttons. Chloe had been rescued.

But she also had a decision to make. Very quickly.

“All this is happening in a matter of seconds,” Chloe said. “And I had no plan. Miley was my only plan.”

But pre-Voice, Chloe was living, performing and working at a coffee shop in Nashville. She’d heard people speak highly of Blake.

And he’d turned his chair for her following her blind audition performance of “The Chain.”

“So I decided, ‘I’m going with Blake, though this makes no sense on paper,'” she said with a smile during a post Voice press conference Tuesday night. “On paper it didn’t make sense, but it works.”

Yeah, you might say it works. Chloe, less than a year removed from that coffee shop, had just won Season 13 of The Voice. And a new car. And a record deal.

Blake thinks the 23-year-old has what it takes to become The Voice’s first bona fide star.

“It’s one thing for me to think that,” he said during the same press conference. “But it’s just been an overwhelming response from social media, from people, friends and family — people love Chloe.

“How do you ignore her voice? How do you not want to own a record that has her voice on it? Something’s wrong with you, something’s physically wrong with you if you don’t want that. That’s how I feel.”

Chloe wasn’t nearly so certain when she auditioned for the show. In fact, she describes herself as having “not a shred of confidence” at the time.

Pre-Voice, she’d been in a blues band for a while. Then she’d been part of a duo with a member of the blues band. The Voice marked her first venture as a solo artist.

The turning point came on Top 11 night, when she covered Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

To that point in the competition, Chloe said she’d watch back her performances. She’d study the expression on her face while singing. It was the expression of a singer who was thinking about singing.

When she hit the chorus on “Total Eclipse,” she let the emotion of the song take over. And sang without thinking about how she was singing.

“I remember walking off stage after that song, hugging Blake, walking off and thinking, ‘That’s a moment I’m never going to forget.’ It was like I literally transformed.”

Viewers of the show made the song number one.

Three weeks later, they did the same for Chloe.