On the ninth season of the television singing competition The Voice, one singer's acoustic renderings of pop hits helped carry her to the semi-finals. Amy Lynn Vachal, a half-Filipina singer/songwriter from Somerset, New Jersey, auditioned with "Dream a Little Dream of Me" and landed on Pharrell Williams' team (she was later "stolen" by Adam Levine during the "Knockout" round). However, her life plan didn't originally include singing. Growing up in a mixed-race family, she was influenced by her father and his love of bluegrass and old gospel-soul. She graduated from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania with a double major in economics and art, but after a traumatic head injury sustained on the lacrosse field, she delved into music as a means of healing and therapy. In 2011, she released her first EP, Appleseed, and followed it three years later with Crinkle Boom. After securing a spot on The Voice, she put her spin on songs by Drake, Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan, and even *NSync before she was eliminated during the semi-finals. She began work on her first proper full-length at the end of 2015. ~ Neil Z. Yeung