Amityville’s Dan Kiernan aces his blind audition on ‘The Voice,’ joins Kelsea Ballerini’s team

Following in the footsteps of last season’s runner-up, Glen Cove native Shye, the latest Long Islander to be chosen for a team on “The Voice” is wedding singer and longtime musical-theater performer Dan Kiernan, of Amityville.

On Monday’s season 27 premiere of NBC’s singing competition (the blind auditions), Kiernan’s rendition of “High Hopes” by the emo-punk group Panic! At the Disco earned him a recruitment buzzer from two of the show’s four coach/mentors, Michael Bublé and John Legend. But as fellow coach Adam Levine looked on, coach Kelsea Ballerini used a new maneuver this season, Coach Replay, to retroactively recruit him.

“You’re really worth it! I messed up!” country-pop star Ballerini conceded of her belated outreach. Maroon 5 frontman Levine, kibitzing playfully with the other judges, told Kiernan, “I would love to see you with Kelsea” — whom Kiernan indeed picked after a few moments of hesitation.

“Nothing,” said Kiernan in a phone call with Newsday Tuesday  when asked what calculations he was pondering in that moment. “Everything was a beautiful blur. Once Michael’s chair turned, my brain kept saying, ‘It happened. You’re on the show.’ And he turned so quickly that I actually got to enjoy the song because I could just look at Michael and perform for him.”

Kiernan, who turns 35 on Feb. 5, was unaware of the new Coach Replay tool, which each judge can use only once per season. “I didn’t know if I was going to have to sing the song again or what was going to happen,” he says. “And then realizing what it was, the fact that she used it to not automatically get me but just to join the fight made me feel like a trillion bucks.”

Born in West Islip and raised in Amityville, he is the younger of two sons of James Kiernan, a tugboat captain who died five years ago, and Helen Kiernan, the clinical competency coordinator at Freeport’s Meadowbrook Care Center. After graduating in 2009 from Long Island Lutheran High School, in Brookville, with a concurrent diploma from BOCES’ Long Island High School for the Arts, in Syosset, he went on to a 2013 degree in musical theater from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.

He has since made a living performing, including three years in cruise ship productions and, currently, steady Friday to Sunday work as a wedding singer. He has performed at such Manhattan venues as The Bitter End, The Bowery Electric and Sony Hall and regularly at gay pride festivals. Since 2022, Kiernan has produced a regular showcase, the New York City Queer Music Festival, at the Brooklyn club 3 Dollar Bill.

“It was formerly called Queerchella,” he says, “but we got a cease-and-desist from [the high-profile California music and arts festival] Coachella last summer,” he adds with amusement.

Kiernan credits his tight-knit family, including his late father, for supporting his pursuit of a music career. His mother and a cousin, Samantha Louden, of North Babylon, both attended his “ Voice” blind audition over the summer, and the three drive together to his festival gigs.

“I first auditioned for [rival singing competition] ‘American Idol’ when I was 16, probably, at the Nassau Coliseum, but my first ‘Voice’ audition was in 2013. I’ve auditioned in some capacity, whether they found me or I went to an open call, on and off for the last 10 years. And every time I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I’ll try one more time, one more time.’”

That persistence paid off last February when he got word he’d be on the show.

“I could never get the image out of my head since I was a kid,” he says, “of singing and hearing that button hit and the chairs turning.” Now it’s real.