Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Reid Umstattd landed a spot on Team Adam Levine for Season 14 of The Voice. (NBC Photo)

His background: Reid says he’s been in one band or another since high school. And he says things started taking off after college. The band he was in at the time started traveling around the country.”We played hundreds of shows,” he says. It was at one of those shows that he met his wife, Jenna. They married in 2013. A year later, he quit the band so they wouldn’t be apart as much. Now he’s the bartender at the Waterloo Icehouse, owned by his father-in-law. “As much as I love bartending at the restaurant, the last three years have shown me how much I miss singing and performing,” he says. The Voice, Reid says, marked the first solo performance he ever did, calling the show “a major second chance for me.”

What the show didn’t show:

* The band Reid was referring to in his intro package is called nelo (rhymes with hello, and, yep, they lowercase it), originally formed by high school classmates and led by guitarist/vocalist Matt Ragland.

* Reid and Ragland became college roommates and started performing together as an acoustic duo. Reid eventually became a singer with nelo.

* The group officially formed in 2005 and moved to Athens, Ga. In one interview, a band member called that move strategic because Athens is a city small enough to get noticed in, but one with a great reputation for music.

* It worked. The band developed a large following and eventually moved back to Texas to record a self-titled debut album under the Texas-based Justice Records label.

* That album was recorded at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studios and released in 2008. It made it onto Billboard’s “Heatseekers” chart.

* The alternative rock band wound up released three more albums and an EP between 2009 and 2014. All are still available on iTunes.

* While Reid is no longer actively touring as part of nelo, he and Ragland released a wonderful 2017 acoustic album called “Roots” featuring stripped-down versions of songs previously released by the group. In fact, at 22 songs, it’s more of a double album.

On picking Team Adam: Reid said that was his thinking going into the audition, but admits Alicia’s pitch made it tough. “But at the end of it, I just kind of came back to what Adam was saying about our shared musical taste. And he kind of hit on — it didn’t show on air — but he spent a lot of years with Maroon 5 before they got famous, traveling in a band just like I did for 10 years with my band. That kind of hit home for me too.”

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