Amityville’s Dan Kiernan wins ‘The Voice’ battle round

Amityville’s Dan Kiernan performed on the NBC singing competition “The Voice” Monday night, winning his Battle Round segment in a one-to-one matchup with fellow Kelsea Ballerini team-member Jessica Manalo.

In an abbreviated montage segment about 96 minutes into the two-hour episode, Kiernan, 34, dressed in a power-blue sport coat, belted Chappell Roan’s 2024 power-pop ballad “Good Luck, Babe!,” about a woman chiding another for denying their same-sex attraction. The proudly gay singer earned his coach’s praise.

“Dan, my man!” Ballerini exclaimed. “In this song when you push and you get to that cool part of your voice where that vibrato comes out and that texture comes out, it’s so yummy.”

After declaring him the winner, the country music star told the camera, “I love that Dan’s voice is so dynamic. I’m along for the ride. I’m very much so on the Dan train,” she said, making a train-whistle hand gesture and the sound “Boop-boop!”

Kiernan now moves on to the Knockouts Round, which commence on March 31.

A wedding singer professionally, who also has performed at such Manhattan venues as The Bitter End, The Bowery Electric and Sony Hall and regularly at gay pride festivals, Kiernan since 2022 has produced a regular showcase, the New York City Queer Music Festival, at the Brooklyn club 3 Dollar Bill.

On the “Voice” season-27 premiere on Feb. 3, his 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.

Born in West Islip and raised in Amityville, Kiernan is the younger of two sons of James Kiernan, a tugboat captain who died five years ago, and Helen Kiernan, now 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.