The year was 2020. Venues were silent, stage lights off. Covid had gutted the music industry.
“Musicians and creatives were all asking, ‘Okay, what do we do now?’” recalls San Diego musician Durell Anthony, a talented vocalist and songwriter. Anthony found one stage that was still open and even designed with built-in social distancing: Stage 12 at Universal Studios, the set for NBC’s massive TV show The Voice.
“I just wanted to go in there and show them who I was,” he says.
He stepped onto the show’s octagonal stage before the judges—Blake Shelton, Kelly Clarkson, John Legend, and Nick Jonas—and a Jumbotron-sized audience of fans on Zoom. In the seconds before your national TV debut in front of four of the world’s most famous musicians, the potential for a panic attack is pretty high. But Anthony sat down at the piano and found his calm.
He laid out the first iconic E-sharp of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” which, in an empty auditorium, resonated like the only sound in the world. With their chairs facing the empty stands, the judges couldn’t see Anthony, but they could hear him (the whole idea of The Voice is that the pop legends on the panel only turn their chairs if the “voice” alone moves them enough).
As Anthony laid out his first breathy croon of Gaye’s heart-wrenching plea for amity—an especially powerful song choice considering the state of the world at the time—Legend’s eyebrows rose immediately.
Legend was first to turn his chair around. At the last moment, Clarkson turned, too. The two judges battled for their chance to help hone Anthony’s falsetto. He chose Legend to be his mentor for the remainder of the show, not least because he’s a huge fan. His audition video reached nearly two million views across YouTube and TikTok.
Anthony’s time on the show was short-lived (he lost his first “battle round,” which took place directly after the audition), but “I walked away with a new confidence,” he says. “Being recognized and validated definitely elevated my songwriting during a dark time.”
He dropped his first full-length album, Lovenotes, last October. Anchored by his San Diego Music Award–nominated single “One More Night”—another piano-backed ballad—the project blends his velvety vocals with warm, honest lyrics about love, growth, and the life he’s built in Southern California.
Anthony grew up in the small town of Atchison, Kansas, raised on church hymns and radio. Like a lot of kids in “the middle of nowhere,” he learned to sing in the pews. His high-toned voice turned a few heads at mass, and he got a vocal scholarship from Benedictine College in Atchison.
After graduating, Anthony moved to La Jolla to work at a now-shuttered children’s summer camp. It’s where he met Kimberly, his wife of 13 years. Having found his songwriting muse, he joined several local bands across San Diego and became an overqualified wedding singer. His moment on The Voice wouldn’t come for a decade, but he kept course for the same reason his music connected with Legend: his deep optimism.
“When I look at artists I love, Stevie Wonder, John Legend, there’s an underlying thread: authenticity,” he says. “I want people to know that love exists, hope exists.”
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An R&B album to its core, Lovenotes is filled with piano slow jams layered beneath Anthony’s sweet falsetto. Some songs are pure imagination, but more than a few are inspired by Kimberly and their kids.
“I pulled from real emotion,” he explains. “Those early years of being with Kim taught me vulnerability, maturity, sacrifice, trust. From facing my fear of commitment in ‘Be With U,’ to the countless apologies behind ‘One More Night,’ to reminiscing on the birth of our firstborn in ‘Speechless,’ my songwriting on this album is shaped by all of these lived experiences.”
