Season 14 contestant on The Voice, Kaleb Lee, returned to the TV show on Tuesday night, Dec. 10 to perform with his former coach, Kelly Clarkson! The two sang Lee’s current single, “I Dream in Southern,” a song that Clarkson not only found for Lee, but insisted on singing with him on it as well.
“Kelly and her husband Brandon [Blackstock] have really taken me in, and just helped me in so many ways,” Lee told PopCulture.com. “She sent me a song shortly after the show, a song called ‘I Dream in Southern.’ And it was an incredible song. We went through the process of trying to figure out if there was going to be another record or not, and finally it did make it obviously.
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“And then I did a show with her, on her tour, her Meaning of Life Tour in March of last year,” he continued. “She said ‘Hey, I wanna sing a song with you,’ and I was like ‘That would be awesome. Let’s do it.’ And then she’s like ‘No, I really wanna sing this song with you. I wanna record the song with you.’”
Lee had already given up his aspirations of making music when producers on The Voice found videos of him performing and asked him to audition. It may seem like a dream invitation for some, but it was one that Lee wrestled with for a while before agreeing to do.
“Probably like anybody else in the industry, I had more no’s than yeses,” Lee admitted to PopCulture.com. “It’s a journey, right? At the time though, it was a season in my life where I was newly married, we had a new baby and we had just found out another one was on the way. So for me, it was like the gut check moment of, ‘Alright, husband, dad, what are you going to do?’ We just decided to get away from music for a while, and for us it wasn’t necessarily running away from music, but it was running toward our family.
“And so we picked a place in Florida which we at least we thought was gonna be far enough away from music that we won’t be tempted to get back in,” he continued. “We’ll just kind of start a new life and do our thing. So that’s what we did for almost 10 years. And then all of a sudden I get a message from somebody on The Voice saying, ‘Would you be willing to audition?’ And here we are.”
Photo Credit: Courtesy of NBC / The Kelly Clarkson Show
