With an emotional resonance far beyond her 18 years, Garden City singer Ava Nat performed Olivia Newton-John\u2019s poignant \u201cHopelessly Devoted to You\u201d on the NBC singing competition \u201cThe Voice\u201d Monday night\u00a0to win her Knockout Round and proceed to the playoffs.<\/p>\n
\u201cAva, you told the story so beautifully,\u201d said her coach, singer Niall Horan, as he gave her the win over her 20-year-old teammate, Sadie Dahl of Draper, Utah. In an insert speaking to the camera, he went on to explain, \u201cAva is the most consistent one we have on this show. Every time she comes out and she gives a shatterproof performance. Her ability to tell a story is insane.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s like I almost blacked out on stage,\u201d Nat \u2014 n\u00e9e Ava Natalie Milone, a 2024 Garden City High School graduate and now a freshman at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee \u2014 told Newsday Tuesday. \u201cI was just kind of, like, so into it that I don’t even remember what happened after. I asked my mom,\u201d attorney Christina Milone, \u201c \u2018What did they say, what did I even do?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Nat and Dahl appeared in the final segment of the two-hour show, beginning with a rehearsal with Horan and Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Joe Walsh, serving as a guest \u201cmega mentor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Singer-guitarist Walsh told the two, \u201cWell, I did some homework and I think you\u2019re both brilliant\u201d \u2014 causing a happily astonished look on Nat\u2019s face. In response to a nervous Nat asking how he got ready for his own first big performance decades ago, Walsh advised her: \u201cTurn your mind off. … All those voices saying, \u2018We need to talk.\u2019 Turn those off. Just be you.\u201d<\/p>\n
She heeded his words, she said, along with dovetailing advice from the show\u2019s vocal coach assigned to her. \u201cShe says to really stay in the moment of what you’re singing. … If your eyes are wandering, you can tell you\u2019re thinking\u201d rather than singing with a clear head and emotions \u2014 \u201cbeing able to stay in there and not be, like, \u2018Oh, no, I\u2019m worried about this next high note\u2019 rather feeling what I’m saying lyrically.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nat, in the rehearsal segment, had told Horan\u00a0and Walsh she chose \u201cHopelessly Devoted to You\u201d \u2014 written by John Farrar for the 1978 movie version of the 1972 Jim Jacobs-Warren Casey Broadway hit \u2014 because, \u201cI think it\u2019s a really powerful song. Super fun to sing, too. This song reminds me of sitting on the couch, watching \u2018Grease\u2019 for the first time with my family. My mom, this is, like, her go-to karaoke song.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Garden City’s Ava Nat is moving on to the next round on “The Voice.” Credit: NBC<\/p>\n
In the musical, the song is that of a teenager in the throes of first love, yet it’s simultaneously about the more grown-up feeling of lasting devotion. Nat said\u00a0she was able to conjure that mature-adult emotion\u00a0by thinking of her late sister, Sabrina, a student at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, who died in June 2019 at age 21 in a single-car accident in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was something I was channeling,\u201d Nat said. \u201cI prayed about it and I really was speaking to my sister and was, like, \u2018I really want to perform this for you and have you feel like you’re in that audience and you’re on that stage with me.\u2019 And that energy that she had is the only way I could describe the energy I had onstage. … It was like I was in another world, and it felt very out-of-body-fever-dreamy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The season 28 \u201cVoice\u201d Playoffs begin Dec. 1 and the live finales will air Dec. 15 and 16.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With an emotional resonance far beyond her 18 years, Garden City singer Ava Nat performed Olivia Newton-John\u2019s poignant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,604,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-257436","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-reality-tv","10":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}