5 days ago
Why is New Zealand's best pop artist auditioning for The Voice Australia?
Two months after winning best pop artist at the Aotearoa Music Awards, Cassie Henderson has popped up as a contestant on The Voice Australia.
On Sunday night, Cassie Henderson stood on The Voice Australia stage, legs planted in warrior pose, diamante mesh shirt twinkling under the studio lights, and unleashed a four-chair-turning cover of Chappell Roan's 'Good Luck Babe' that rang right across the Tasman Sea. Judge Ronan Keating lurched his densely-braceleted arm towards the red button before she even got to the chorus. An enraptured Mel C joined him soon after, as did Richard Marx and Kate Miller-Heidke.
All four judges then stood, utterly agog, as Henderson belted out the big clincher – 'I toooold yooou ssooooOOOOOOooooOOO' – sealing the deal with an expertly-timed hairflip. 'Thaaaat's coooooool,' Keating slurred in ecstasy to his chair mate Marx. As Henderson finished the song, beaming and breathless, a giant '4' flashed up on the LED floor to show that all four judges were fizzing to have her on their team. 'Yes!' exclaimed Keating from the depths of his powder blue suit. 'That's what it's about!'
Can I just say, on behalf of Aotearoa: yeah, no shit Sherlock? It was just two months ago that we all watched Henderson win Best Pop Artist of the year at the Aotearoa Music Awards, after her own Roan-esque single 'Seconds to Midnight' celebrated a whopping 15 weeks at number one in the radio play charts and one thousand weeks rattling around my noggin. Go even further back, before her tour, an equally catchy 2023 single, and two EPs, and many will remember the Taylor Swift-obsessed teenager who made it to the quarterfinals on X Factor NZ in 2013.
So what does it mean that an award-winning, industry-recognised local artist is blind auditioning for a singing competition across the ditch? Isn't that a bit like… Karen Walker going on Project Runway? Have singing competitions quietly abandoned their amateur roots? Or is this just the natural step for any artist from our deck furniture piss country, where the top 50 singles of 2024 only included one local song (from 2023), and discovering local artists is only getting harder and harder in the streaming age?
Dr Rebecca Trelease, senior media studies lecturer at AUT, wrote a whole PhD chapter about the endurance of American Idol, and has kept a close eye on the evolution of singing competitions ever since. For her, Henderson auditioning on The Voice in 2025 makes perfect sense. Firstly, there's the 'authenticity' of the format: 'The Voice is really trying to capture the idea that they are the ones who take singing really seriously. They don't want gimmicks, they don't want sad origin stories, this is purely about your voice.'
There's also the enormous audience to consider – The Voice Australia premiere was watched by around 948,000 people on Sunday night. 'That is a huge step up when you are an artist in New Zealand in terms of global reach,' Trelease says. 'So she's already opened herself up to a million more fans than she would have had last week, which is really awesome. Especially when you consider that a reality show was how she entered the music industry in the first place, it's kind of perfect.'
This is also not the first time a New Zealand musician has wowed on The Voice. Local artist Jaeyden Randell, who was the voice behind the te reo Māori version of Moana and Frozen, made it to the grand final of The Voice Australia just last year. In 2022, country superstar Kaylee Bell auditioned with her own song 'Keith', written about then-judge Keith Urban. The song went to #12 in the US charts, became a certified gold record in Australia and New Zealand, and she credits her time on The Voice as changing her life.
Trelease says the casting of more experienced, sometimes even professional singers, shows that the singing competition genre has evolved past the Susan Boyle myth – the idea that a supremely talented singer might just wander in off the streets having never performed onstage in their lives. 'There's a big part of the setup of singing shows which has traditionally been hidden from the audience, which is the investment of time, labour and money from the contestants into developing their talent,' she says.
'So with someone like Cassie Henderson entering the show, we actually know for a fact that she's been doing this for the last 10 years, which is actually exposing that element of the production to the audience,' says Trelease. 'That's good in a way, especially compared to the reality shows from 20 years ago that we were just supposed to accept as totally real, and not think or talk about them being produced in any way. The audience understands now that there are bigger things at play.'
And in a topsy-turvy world where AI artists are bringing in huge numbers and even famous popstars can't release a record without a viral TikTok sound, Trelease says the traditional career trajectories in the music industry have crumbled and nobody really knows what to do. 'It's not as simple as performing heaps, getting noticed and getting famous anymore – you have to have something that pushes you out there,' she says. And in Henderson's case, that special something could come from returning to where it all began.
'I think it's fabulous that someone can get their first big exposure as an artist on a reality show, continue with their art for over 10 years, and then return to reality to get to that next level of their career,' says Trelease. 'Everyone loves a comeback story.'
