Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Blind audition: Dana Harper, 25, of Dallas, Texas, auditioned with “Jealous” by Nick Jonas. And she prompted chair turns from Blake Shelton and Alicia Keys. At the very last minute, Adam Levine turned too. Alicia praised Dana for her “magnificent control” and “beautiful tone.” Dana said “Jealous” is a song she and her young niece sing together in the car all the time. Dana joined Team Blake in one of the night’s biggest shockers.

Her background: Her dad is a bit famous: Derek Harper, who played in the NBA for 16 seasons, playing nearly 1,200 games for four teams, the Dallas Mavericks, New York Knicks, Los Angeles Lakers and Orlando Magic. He jokes that Dana inherited zero of his basketball skills. He says he coached her fifth-grade team and realized then she’d have to find her niche doing something else. With her deep voice, that niche became singing as she moved to New York and took second place in an amateur competition at the Apollo Theatre. She eventually moved back home and says she’s “working for something greater.”

What the show didn’t show:
* Dana discovered her niche in high school, earning all-state choir honors for four straight years, according to her bio on The Voice website. In fact, she became the #1 tenor in Texas.
* The move to New York came when she headed off to college.
* Her other honors include placing second on BET’s “106 and Park” program and winning MTV’s “Wild ‘N Out Wednesday.”
* The Voice bio says she currently performs about once a week in the Dallas area.
* Last year, she released a single called “Mind Games” that you can find on iTunes. You can check out a live version below, but the audio isn’t great. The official version sounds much, much better.
* You’ll find just three covers on her YouTube channel, but head to Soundcloud and you can hear more from Dana.
* In an interview with a hometown TV station, Dana said she decided to sing “Jealous” because of her niece. “That’s our song and I thought it would be cool for her to have this memory for the rest of her life. And I also just love that song. I also thought it would be cool to set myself apart and do something different.”
* Since her Voice audition, she has performed at a “Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline” fundraiser in Dallas. Another featured artist was Voice colleague Josh Halverson.
* As for the shocker of picking Blake as her coach, Dana said this during a conference call with the media: “I think myself and probably everybody else that was watching assumed that I was going to pick Alicia. And going into it, that was my plan if I were to have the opportunity. But I decided to go with Blake because I wanted to grow. Not that I wouldn’t grow with Alicia, but I wanted to grow in a different way. You know, Alicia does R&B and soul and that’s kind of the same type of music that I do. So I wanted to challenge myself and learn something different and work with an artist and work with a coach that I many not ever have the opportunity to do so again. And Blake is just so charming and his eyes are shiny and blue and I couldn’t — I had to go with Blake.”

Keeping up with Dana:
Twitter: @DanaHarperMusic
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