Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Blind audition: Kylie Rothfield, 23, of Danville, Calif., performed One Republic’s “Wherever I Go,” doing a stripped down version of the song. Blake Shelton and Alicia Keys turned around near the end of the song, though Blake said “there was never a moment you didn’t have me.” Alicia complimented Kylie on being “so completely yourself.” Kylie decided to join Team Alicia.

Her background: Kylie says her dad was always listening to the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles. Her mother was a performer. Kylie got her first guitar at 11 and, according to her mother, used to sleep with her guitar so it’d be handy if she woke up with a song on her mind. She was just 12 when she first performed a song she wrote. “It was absolutely life-changing,” she recalls. She started entering talent shows and joined all the choirs at school. She went to the Berklee School of Music for two years, then started performing, touring New York, Chicago and Scotland. “I was at a point where I thought things were really happening,” she recalled. Then she was performing a big show in Nashville in November 2014 when she felt “something happen in my voice.” She has suffered a vocal hemorrhage and was put on vocal rest. Kylie says she just got her voice back prior to beginning The Voice process.

What the show didn’t show:
* She wrote that first original — “Tuesday Morning,” about the struggles of fitting in at school — with a No. 2 pencil in a tattered notebook, according to her Facebook bio. Then she says she performed it “clumsily for a small crowd.”
* Her reaction: “I experienced a feeling that I’ve never been able to forget. “Since then, music has confounded me, frustrated me, defined me and saved me; and I’ll probably spend the rest of my life being completely infatuated with it.”
* In 2012, she and Nick Villalva placed second in a Perez Hilton cover contest singing Maroon 5’s “Payphone.”
* In an interview with her hometown newspaper, SF Weekly, she says the two years she spent at Berklee were invaluable. “Berklee is where I found my soulful sound and learned how to write pop music and play blues and jazz on the guitar. It also gave me confidence in myself as an artist and challenged my work ethic on a daily basis.”
* The performances in Scotland came in 2013 as an opening act for Irish musician Dominic Kirwan and the country duo of Joey + Rory.
* She released a three-track EP called “Nothing Without Love” when she was very young, but has followed it up with a series of more mature releases — a 2011 single called “Falling Star,” a 2014 EP called “Rag Dolls” (on CD Baby), a 2015 pop single called “Like You Should” and a very addictive single from earlier this year called “Bring It To Me.” The official video for “Like You Should” is embedded below; you can hear the full version of the latest single on Kylie’s website.
* That vocal hemorrhage put Kylie on complete vocal rest — she couldn’t even whisper — for a month. During that time, she turned her focus to songwriting. She told SF Weekly it was almost seven months before she was ready to perform a full band show again.
* Kylie said she would have loved to have worked with Blake, but added “I’ve looked up to Alicia Keys my entire life. She’s an incredible singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, so I felt that we could connect and that I would have a lot to learn from her. But even more than that, she is just this insanely phenomenal human being. Her soul and energy and spirit are otherworldly.”

Keeping up with Kylie:
Twitter: @kylierothfield
Website
Facebook
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