There’s always a lot of pressure on singers in the lead-up to The Voice’s knockout round. But vocal looping artist Edwina ‘Edde’ Masson has more than just her singing to think about.
“I have chronic fatigue and another autoimmune condition,” Edde reveals to TV WEEK.
To avoid a flare up of the chronic fatigue before her performance, Edde, 32, needed to take medications and supplements and keep to a strict care routine – all things the other singers didn’t have to worry about.
“They were like, ‘I get to sing and I get to go out to dinner!’ and I’m out here in a magnesium bath!” she remembers.
“In an interview with the producers, they asked me: ‘Do you think your body can get through the show?’ And I just had to say: ‘We shall see.’”
As the Queensland mum-of-one explained in her blind audition episode, she also suffered hyperemesis gravidarum during pregnancy, a type of severe morning sickness that meant she was being sick every day, something which damaged her vocal cords.
“It was really brutal,” she remembers of that time. “It was during Covid and we had no family because we were in Margaret River in WA.
“And then we had a really hectic birth, and I had a child who was really angry at the world and he screamed catatonically for a year and a half. It was very much a dark night of the soul.”
She says her voice still isn’t back to what it was before her pregnancy.
“It is a constant battle because, as a result of the damage that I did, and also with my chronic fatigue, my voice doesn’t have the resilience that it used to have.”
Edde, who makes her living as a songwriter and a lecturer in performing arts, says she felt “vulnerable” leading up to the knockouts.
“I really did have to do a lot of self-talk,” she adds.
But, despite it all, she’s glad she auditioned for The Voice, in front of coaches Melanie C, Richard Marx, Ronan Keating and Kate Miller-Heidke, as well as secret fifth coach Tones And I.
“I think there’s a 10-year-old version of me that really wanted to do this, and so I’m really proud that I said yes for the young version of myself, the one that just wanted to be on stage and wanted to be seen.”
Catch The Voice on Mondays at 7.30pm and Sundays at 7pm on Channel Seven or 7plus.
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