We learned very little about Loren Allred on The Voice because only a small snippet of her blind audition was shown.
Fortunately, her bio on the Compound Entertainment website fills in a lot of the blanks.
Though she now lives in New York, Loren was born in Pittsburgh, the daughter of an operatic soprano and a choral conductor. By age 4, she was studying piano. By age 7, she was singing with children’s choirs.
Most of her training was in classical music, but the site says she fell in love with contemporary and pop music when she earned a full-ride scholarship to study musical theater at Weber State University in Utah.
But in a recent conference call interview, Loren says the transition from classical to popular music happened a little earlier than that, when she was 12 or 13 and got her first Mariah Carey and Toni Braxton albums.
“I was like, ‘What is this?’ You know, like I need to be part of this. So I basically just started singing along with that and decided that I wanted to completely break from the classical world.”
In pursuit of better musical opportunities than Utah could offer, she later landed at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, performing in a wedding band when she wasn’t studying to make ends meet.
She also started posting videos to YouTube. Though most of those have now been disabled, her YouTube channel attracted more than 15,000 subscribers and more than 1 million views.
And, at one point, she says she signed with Island Def Jam Records. Only the people who signed her left their jobs shortly thereafter, leaving her “kind of getting forgotten and shelved.
“And it got to a point where I just thought, ‘OK, I’m locked in this deal, nothing is ever going to come out and I need to share my music somehow. So I was living in New York and I decided it was time to go back to wedding singing and I was just going to do my own music kind of underground. I was just kind of in a panic. I really didn’t know what to do.”
Then came The Voice, offering an outlet for the 22-year-old who classifies her music as pop with soul and jazz influences.
For her blind audition, Loren sang “When Love Takes Over,” then had to pick between Adam and Cee Lo as her coach.
Her rationale for choosing Adam is a whole lot different than lots of Voice contestants, who put considerable stock in who turns around first while they’re singing.
“I liked that Adam turned around at the very end,” she told Christina Milian in a post-audition interview. “I want someone who’s going to be hard on me, who will be brutally honest and get the best out of me.”
You can check out two of Loren’s covers below. Snoop around YouTube and you can also find a couple of clips of her performing with Ne-Yo, also of Compound Entertainment.
Editor’s Note: Check back for live blogs once the battle rounds begin on The Voice.
Loren singing Adele’s “Chasing Pavements”
Loren singing Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love”
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