Idol Chatter & Voice Views

His audition: Gabriel Wolfchild, 26, Seattle, Wash., auditioned with Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” a song he learned when a woman broke his heart. He was only a few words in when Adam turned around. Midway through the performance, he was joined by Blake. And a nice, tender performance also eventually enticed Christina to turned around. Christina complimented him on selling the performance with his voice. Gabriel joined Team Christina.

His background: He chose the name; he’s says it’s part of the tradition in his family. He explains that since he was a child, his parents would attend an international festival called The Rainbow Gathering. As part of the event, participants are to discover their true name. His brother goes by Lion Truth Heart; his dad goes by Blue Mountain. His parents run a non-demoninational church. “Growing up, I was kind of resentful toward my alternative parents,” Gabriel admits. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you guys are just a bunch of hippies.’ Now, I really see the beauty in the family they’ve created.” Gabriel wound up attending art school, where he would play guitar in the hallways. “People would give me crap about it. ‘Why are you at an art school? You should be playing music.'” He now does “an indie-folk thing” traveling around playing coffee shops and similar places. “I’m not making a lot of money, but I always make enough,” he says.

What the show didn’t show: Well-traveled, Gabriel was born in North Carolina, raised in Seattle, spent time in Hawaii and wound up attending college in Boston and San Francisco, where he studied in the sculpture department at the Academy of Arts University. It’s there that he would spend his studio breaks singing songs in stairwells. “I was playing guitar, but I wouldn’t sing for anybody,” he says in his Voice video. “I was really shy about sharing my voice.” Eventually that shyness wore away when he realized he could use music to reach people, he said, “touching those tender, hurt places in them and then we can heal together.” Near the end of 2012, he released an album called “A Cry to the Moon,” but he hasn’t always performed solo. He’s performed as part of a group called the White River Wolves, which included his brother Eli. And, according to his Facebook page, he released an EP to bandcamp.com called “The Shooting Stars Sessions” with Carlien Jeanne, a U.S. Dutch singer-songwriter, around the same time his album dropped. But in his Voice video, he says it took the prodding of a friend to get him to respond to an email inviting him to audition for The Voice.

On picking Christina: “I mean, Christina Aguilera, I did know her, but she was not who I was planning on going with. But it really came down to Blake and Adam both kind of had this idea of who I was when they saw me sing. She was the one person who was kind of honest: ‘I don’t know who you are or what you are, but I want to work with you and make you better.'”

On iTunes: His Voice audition song and a 10-track album, “A Cry to the Moon,” from December 2012.

Update: Gabriel was pitted against Joe Tolo in the battle round. They sang “For the First Time” in a performance that was part of a montage. Christina declared Joe the winner; Gabriel was eliminated.

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Blackbird (from “A Cry to the Moon” album)

Momma, You’ve Been on My Mind (Jeff Buckley cover)

San Francisco (from “A Cry to the Moon” album)