The newest season of NBC's hit singing competition The Voice is trucking right along. And last night, soul singer Josh Hoyer found himself stuck between a rock and a hard place. Or rather, between two passionate coaches.
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Hoyer sang "Oh Girl" by the Chi-Lites, and though it took him a minute or so, turned both Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani around in their chairs. The 40-year-old singer from Lincoln, Neb. told Alicia Keys his biggest influences are singers like Otis Redding and James Brown.
"Sounds right to me," Keys quips. "You have a lot of soulful wisdom in your voice," Adam Levine adds.
Stefani felt the need to turn around because she didn't have anybody like Hoyer on her team. "There's nobody like you on our teams cause there's nobody like you on the show," Shelton explains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k0_agNyvL0
Hoyer has a family and spent years touring. Pretty simply, he says, he's "tired of playing the bars." But adds that music is something "the world needs right now," so he's sticking with it.
For his part, Shelton says he turned around because he could just sense Hoyer deserved to be on the show. He got a rise out of the crowd by adding that if you're going to be on The Voice, you might as well be on the winning team.
Shelton's contestants have won The Voice five out of eleven times, more than any other coach. Adam Levine, who joins Shelton as the only coach there for all twelve seasons, took singers to the winners circle three times. For Josh Hoyer, picking Shelton seemed like the right call for where he is right now.
The Voice remains enormously popular across the globe. Though the singing show hasn't spawned any superstars like American Idol, viewers routinely tune in to watch the coach's playful banter while singers battle it out for attention.
