Suzanna Choffel has been a music teacher in Austin and Brooklyn and told The Voice that’s how she makes her living.
And she clearly enjoys what she does.
“Sometimes you have a really shy kid. By the third lesson, you’ll see something beautiful coming from them and they become more outgoing,” she tells The Voice. “That’s what music can do for people.”
Now, the 32-year-old Texas native would like to share her music with a broader audience.
And, in the process, she wants to show her students how to follow a dream.
“I feel like I’ve worked my butt off,” she says. “I educated myself in music. I educated others in music. So I put in my time. I feel like it’s time for me to kind of shine.”
So she took to The Voice stage, performed Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide” and shined brightly enough to get Blake and Adam to turn around.
“It’s hard to come up here and have something sound refreshing and unique, and that’s what I heard in your voice,” Adam said.
Blake said he heard a “country flair” in her version of the song and went so far as to say he could see her in the Voice finale.
What the show didn’t show: Suzanna played sax in her high school band and also plays guitar, harmonica, the piano and the ukulele, according to her Facebook and Voice bios. That Facebook bio says she’ll settle on describing herself as “a smoky-voiced female lead singing pop songs with a little bit of an urban feel”; she classifies her music as indie soul/jazzy pop. More importantly, Suzanna has two full albums under her belt that you can find on iTunes — “Shudders and Rings” released in 2006 and “Steady Eye Shaky Bow” (love that album title) from 2011. But her best work might be yet to come considering a new song called “Golden Fires” that I’ve embedded below. It’s excellent. You can hear several more of Suzanna’s songs, plus a few covers, on her YouTube channel and her website. In her post-audition interview, Suzanna said she picked Blake because she liked what he said about hearing “a distinct” sound in her voice.
Editor’s Note: Check back for live blogs once the battle rounds begin on The Voice.
Suzanna Choffel’s video for “Golden Fires”
Leave a reply