There are a lot of things that Joe Vivona knows now that he didn’t know before he stepped into the national television spotlight: He knows that he has a lot of friends in the music business. He knows that he has a lot of fans. He knows that he has a lot of opportunities ahead. And he knows, with absolute certainty, that when faced with a challenge he has never faced before, fear is “a useless emotion.”
Vivona, who grew up in Verona and graduated Verona High School with the class of 2006, was one of the original contestants on season 10 of the reality TV show The Voice. During months of tryouts behind the scenes, he beat out some 45,000 singers from all over the United States for one of just 48 audition spots in the show’s opening episodes. He was widely praised for his on-air blind audition, singing John Mayer’s “Dreaming with a Broken Heart”. Three of the show’s four judges–Adam Levine, Blake Shelton and Pharrell Williams–turned their chairs to signal their approval of his performance. “You electrified the room,” said Shelton. “There’s such a presence to your voice.”
Under the show’s rules, blind audition contestants can choose to be on the team of any judge who turns his or her chair. Saying that he was following the advice of his 95-year-old gradnfather, Vivona picked Williams. He got some intensive coaching from Williams and Sean Combs, who tried to help Vivona overcome his nerves. The goal was to last through several more rounds of competitions to win the show’s $100,000 grand prize and a major recording contract. That, alas, wasn’t to be. Vivona was eliminated after his first battle with fellow Team Pharrell member Caity Peters.
But while Vivona is out, he is definitely not down. “It’s been a year of going after things that I didn’t think were possible,” Vivona says.
And more possibilities lie ahead. Vivona is taking acting classes and meeting with agents, who understand that coming all the way through The Voice‘s grueling qualification process means that Vivona’s talent has been vetted by some of the best people in the industry. Vivona believes that his next step could put him in the music scene on either coast, as well as in Nashville. That is a staggering range of options for someone who once saw The Voice‘s audition process as an almost insurmountable challenge.
“I didn’t go into it thinking I would get to the blind auditions,” Vivona says recalling the initial tryouts, which lasted eight months. “I thought, ‘how cool would it be if I got a call back’?”
As he works through his new career options, Vivona is reaching out to everyone who followed him on social media and thanking them for their support. “They wanted to be positive, so I am returning that,” he says. He’s also making sure that everyone gets the message of the video he posted after the blind auditions: Don’t be afraid. “Fear comes from a place of wanting to do well and being unsure of the outcome,” he says. “You have to take the negative connotation that fear has and turn it into a positive. Fear is wanting to do well and you have to will yourself to be positive.”
Photo by Paul Drinkwater/NBC
