Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Magnus from The Voice Season 23

The Voice returns to NBC Monday night.

Here’s more about Magnus:

* He’s Magnus Martin and, in his Voice audition video, he identifies himself as an educator from Virginia Beach, Va.

* “I always wanted to go on The Voice the last couple of seasons,” he says in that video. “But I’ve been in school and now I’m teaching. I’m taking a leap of faith and I’m just going to go for it.”

* Then he launches into an impressive cover of Stevie Wonder’s “You and I,” calling it one of the best love ballads ever released.

* Magnus is from Freeport, Bahamas and graduated from Indian River High School in Chesapeake, Va., where he still lives.

* He’s also a graduate of Norfolk State University, where he studied music education and voice.

* Magnus was part of the Voices of Fire choir on a Netflix series of the same name that aired in November 2020. The series followed Bishop Ezekial Williams, uncle of Pharrell Williams, as he pursued his dream of creating a world-class gospel choir.

* In February 2021, Magnus celebrates the release of the first Voices of Fire single — “Hit the Refresh” — and of plans to perform the song on Good Morning America.

* One of Magnus’s most memorable performances came in January 2020 when he traveled to New York with the Voices of Fire choir. They backed Pharrell as he sang “Letter to My Godfather” on the Jimmy Kimmel show.

* Below, check out Magnus’s performance of “Solitude” by Ella Fitzgerald. “This is the first time I wrote original lyrics to a song and performed it,” he writes in the description of the April 22 YouTube post.

Magnus on social media:
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
YouTube