How this singer went from Johnson County talent to ‘amazing’ contender on ‘The Voice’

The first time she stepped onto “The Voice” stage at Universal Studios Hollywood, she jokingly said she was wearing “clown couture.” A short pink dress embellished with rhinestone hearts over black-and-white checkered tights. Pink boots. Big purple heart-shaped earrings floating from her ears.

The look was classic Kate Cosentino. Colorful. Quirky. Not afraid to make a statement — on national TV or at Blue Valley West High School, where she might not have felt like “the prettiest girl in the room,” but she got noticed.

It wasn’t her boisterous flair with fashion that snagged this 23-year-old a shot at instant fame on one of TV’s hottest singing competitions. (Though she has inspired her own Charlie Hustle T-shirt. More on that in a minute.)

Cosentino moved beyond last month’s blind auditions to compete in “The Battles” round, where she will go head-to-head against a fellow contestant. “The Voice” airs at 7 p.m Monday and 8 p.m. Tuesday on NBC. (The show won’t divulge which episode features Cosentino.)

During blind auditions the four celebrity judges don’t see the singers, not at first anyway. They sit in big red chairs with their backs to the stage. If they like what they hear they swivel their chairs around to see the performer.

Kelly Clarkson turned around first when Cosentino began singing the iconic “I’ll Say a Little Prayer,” written by Kansas City-born Burt Bacharach and recorded by Dionne Warwick.

Chance The Rapper, a new judge this season, turned around next.

Niall Horan followed. The former One Direction star, also new to the show, put his hands up to his face, smiled and gushed as Cosentino sang. “Amazing,” he said.

Clarkson said she had “such a pretty alto register, kinda like lullaby-ish.” Chance liked Cosentino’s “cool vibe.”

“The Voice” is an exclamation point in the life of a young woman who had her first guitar lesson in first grade and began voice lessons in third grade, when she also began writing songs. And pretty much, she hasn’t stopped singing since.

Her parents, Lea and Steve Cosentino of Overland Park, filled their home with music. Mom favors crooners like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Dad is into rock, like Pink Floyd, and took his only daughter to concerts where she would ask for the T-shirts.

“You see this light in them and you know that that’s going somewhere. That’s what I always thought,” her mom said.

Cosentino released her first album in seventh grade and another in high school. She finished in the Top 10 of the KC SuperStar singing competition with her rendition of “Don’t Know Why” by Norah Jones.

In 2017, the year she graduated high school, she was chosen to write a song for a new American Girl doll.

Two years ago she sang a couple of songs to open for Katy Perry at a Taco Bell convention.

After high school, Cosentino moved to Nashville to study music business and songwriting at Belmont University and to be close to the music scene there. She graduated in December 2020.

Like fellow Johnson Countians who have found celebrity elsewhere — “Ted Lasso” star Jason Sudeikis, for one — Kansas City is still home. On “The Voice,” she introduced herself as Kate Cosentino from Kansas City.

“I feel acknowledged, but I always have by Kansas City. I feel like now it’s just on a larger basis,” Cosentino told The Star. “And it almost feels like a very ‘Ted Lasso’ moment where we’re all like, ‘Look, Kansas City is awesome and great people come from there.’

“So I feel more like I’m celebrating with everyone here. And other people are getting the memo that Kansas City is great.”

She saw a “Ted Lasso” poster — with Sudeikis big and proud — on the side of a Warner Bros. building on her way to “The Voice” set and took it as a sign.

“My guardian angel, Jason Sudeikis,” she said.

Next gen of KC singer-songwriters

She came back to Kansas City for a friend’s wedding and stayed on last week to visit her old Blue Valley schools, including Lakewood Middle School and Lakewood Elementary.

She also spent an evening answering questions from and performing for about a dozen aspiring young singers and songwriters taking classes at The Rebel Song Academy, a youth music camp run by the nonprofit Art as Mentorship, founded by Kansas City musician Enrique Chi.

The academy was just getting off the ground when Cosentino took a few classes in high school. The students and their musician mentors now meet weekly inside a historic red brick home in Northeast Kansas City.

Chi, a member of the Kansas City band Making Movies, started the academy to help young people in the neighborhood find and hone their diverse voices through music.

He invited Cosentino to talk to the students and their mentors about the music business and being on “The Voice.”

She did more than that.

Charlie Hustle, maker of iconic Kansas City T-shirts, has created a Kate Cosentino shirt, she said. Part of the proceeds will go to Art as Mentorship, which Chi is working to keep afloat. The song academy is the organization’s flagship program.

The T-shirt design is not final, but the goal is to have it available on CharlieHustle.com by Tuesday, and possibly in stores by the end of the week, according to store officials who said the website is the best place to check first.

Cosentino encouraged this next generation of musicians to make eye contact with their audiences, which she does “so that they know I’m seeing you and that I’m singing this song to you.”

She told them to think about the “theater” of the lyrics and how “making your face match what you’re saying, I feel, is really important.” And, that connection with the audience is more important than perfection of the performance.

Chi called it a “full-circle moment” for Cosentino. It was certainly another memorable fashion moment. Some of the students asked about the sparkly rainbow boots she wore.

Chi told the students that when he first met Cosentino she “was a high school student who was already crushing it writing songs. And she was pumping out music, putting out songs. …

“Kate showed up and she could have been like a teacher. … But it’s so fun to see her experience. She’s now moved to Nashville and is now on ‘The Voice’ and is entering that space on her journey.”

“Represent!” someone in the room shouted.

She told the students her voice teacher handed her a pen and paper when she was in third grade and told her, “You need to write.” So she did.

“I was crazy and just dove headfirst into recording, performing out and I released a record in middle school and a record in high school. Just by the sheer willpower of ‘I want to do this,’” she said.

“And I feel like because I learned a lot, wrote a lot of bad songs, but a million songs, and learned how to do that process, over and over again, failing and then doing it well, failing and then doing it well, that when I finally got to do it now as an adult it feels like, ‘OK, I know a little bit more of I’m not going to do that again, I’m definitely going to do that again.”

‘The Irish and Italians get on’

Missouri is represented on the show, thus far, by Neil Salsich of St. Louis, who sang Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonk Blues” for his blind audition and chose Blake Shelton to mentor him.

Last fall, 17-year-old Daysia Reneau from Leavenworth impressed judges with her blind audition performance of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” but she got knocked out in an early round.

Cosentino chose to be coached by Horan, an Irish singer-songwriter. He told her that singing “I’ll Say a Little Prayer” demonstrated she has high standards.

“You could go all the way,” he told her after her audition. “You’ve given us this really, really famous massive hit that’s really tough to sing. There’s an already-made star in there. You’ve got this Italian confidence.

“Famously the Irish and Italians get on. And you’re not afraid to take a risk. and I’m telling you, Team Niall, we’re going to be risking every week.”

Cosentino failed twice to get on “The Voice.” She and her mom, who visited The Rebel Song Academy with her, joked that she doesn’t have a sob story of adversity or struggle that reality TV loves.

Her biography for “The Voice” says she hails “from a loud and proud Italian family.” (FYI: They are cousins of the Cosentino grocery-chain family.)

“I feel I got on this time because I completely know my brand as an artist way more than I did when I was 15,” she said. “And I was like, my story is I’m the goofball. You always need a happy, fun character. I was like, I’m the comedic relief.

“And sure enough, it worked.”

Chi asked her what it was like to have “millions of eyeballs” on her during her audition. Cosentino called it “strange,” because the theater wasn’t full and she started out singing to the backs of the judges’ chairs.

“It’s not a big crowd, by any means,” she said. “So I was scared because obviously it’s a bunch of celebrities and I knew it was going to be broadcast.

“But I don’t think it hit me until I watched it a couple of weeks ago when they aired it and I was like, ‘Oh, so 6 million people tuned into this on television.”

Chi asked her what she wants to be doing in five years. In Nashville she performs and writes. Her bio for the show reveals that she would like to write music for movies, “especially if Jack Black is involved.”

“I would love to be touring and playing my music to an audience that gets my vibe,” she told the students. “I write a lot of songs about things I care about like body image, just my experiences as a person.”

Before she left, she sang a song she wrote about three years ago in college called “Prettiest Girl in the Room.”

“It’s kind of my homage to my high school experience of being kinda the nerdy girl who dressed like this and was confident in it and loved it,” she said.

“But I think I could have been a little more empathetic to my friends who didn’t act the way that I did and also a little more confident that I am beautiful and I am pretty, because I struggled with that when I was a kid. “

The students watched her intently as she sang. She saw them watching because she followed her own rule and made frequent eye contact with them.

Heads turn towards girls with more time to spend at the gym.

I was born short. So call me poor sport. But I envy every one of them.

I’ve been the grade-maker. I’ve been the game-changer.

But I’ve never been the prettiest girl in the room.

wonder what it feels like to catch everyone’s eyes.

hate that I want it, too.

Maybe just sometimes I’d like to feel like the prettiest girl in the room.

When she finished, one of the adult mentors told her: “I feel like we just got a master class in performance.”

A girl in the front row raised her hand.

“It’s not really a question,” she told Cosentino. “But I don’t know what you looked like then, but you are really pretty.”