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“Ethereal” Olivia Kuper Harris “Transcended” The Voice Blinds: “You’re Special”

She jazzed The Voice Season 27 right up! 

By Elizabeth Logan

Jazz is alive and well in Olivia Kuper Harris, the Dallas-born singer whose Blind Audition for The Voice Season 27 made the Coaches swoon. "Being on stage, I feel like it's my purpose in life," Harris revealed, getting choked up. "It makes me emotional because I've looked for so many other things I could possibly do…and this is it, man."

Olivia Kuper Harris got three chair turns on The Voice

How to Watch

Watch The Voice on Mondays and Tuesdays at 8/7c on NBC and next day on Peacock. 

For her Blind Audition, she chose "a song about longing," Doris Day's "Dream a Little Dream of Me." Coach John Legend turned his chair around for her first, followed by Adam Levine, who asked Kelsea Ballerini, "What are you waiting for?"

RELATED: John Legend’s Daughter Just Made a Surprise Appearance on The Voice

"I don't know! You're so right," she responded, hitting her button. "I was feeling it, I wasn’t thinking about it," Levine told Harris afterward, adding, "You're really special" and reassuring her that holdout Michael Bublé "is a fool."

Nobody's fool, Legend praised Harris by saying, "what got me at first was just the beauty of your tone." Ballerini noted that Harris had cross-genre appeal before a final comment from, as Legend put it, "Last Word Adam." Final remark aside, Harris chose Team Legend!

John Legend wears a leather jacket and poses for The Voice Season 27

How John Stephens became John Legend

Will Olivia change her name when she makes it big? Maybe her Coach can advise her. Born John Roger Stephens, Legend explained his stage name during a March 2021 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

"Well, it was a nickname that some friends started calling me in the studio, just guys that I was collaborating with," Legend told Host Jimmy Fallon. "The first guy to call me that was J. Ivy...He just started calling me 'The Legend' because he thought I sounded like one of our old-school soul legends. And it just caught on with our little group of friends, and then they were like, 'We should call you John Legend.' And it just really was in our little circle."

RELATED: Watching The Voice Season 27 Blind Auditions Was a Joyous Experience

"It was bold, and I knew people would be like, 'He'd better be good if he's going to call himself John Legend,'" The Voice Coach recalled in a 2006 New York Times interview. "So I said, 'Let me go out and make the best music I can, and maybe, after my career is over, I've lived up to the name.'"