‘The Voice’ Season 10 Eliminated Contestant Daniel Passino Says His Coach Didn’t Fight For Him After His Live Performance

Earlier this week, Season 10 of NBC’s “The Voice” kicked things into high gear with the elimination of top 10 contestant Daniel Passino from Pharrell Williams’ team. Now, with the show in his rear-view mirror, the artist is getting candid about his time on the reality competition and what he wishes had happened differently.

Fans may remember Passino from his performances on “The Voice” live stage, such as “Time After Time,” “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” and “When I Was Your Man.” He was previously a member of Christina Aguilera’s team before getting voted off the show in the knockout rounds. Eventually, he made his way back as Williams’ coach save before the live playoffs, which gave him a chance to claw his way into the top 10 before being eliminated. Fortunately, he’s sanguine about getting voted off at this time as the show was taking a toll on his health.

“I think my time on ‘The Voice’ really went really well. Obviously there’s some things you would want to do differently and there’s some things that you wish happened differently,” Passino said in a recent conference call with the press. “I’ve been beating myself up over being eliminated last night but truth of the matter is I have been sick for the last couple of weeks, the last week pretty sick and I don’t think I could go on much longer anyway. It’s just very tedious.”

Passino had a feeling that his second elimination on Season 10 was coming when his Monday night live performance of the Aerosmith ballad received rare criticism from the coaches, as well as critics of the show.

“I mean, you can listen to the performance and judge for yourself. But I think there have been multiple times on the show where there have been people with intonation issues that have never been said, never brought up and their actual performances were praised. And then we’re so far along on the show that never happens,” he said. “So it was just interesting that the coaches would even say that. And then when it got to my coach’s turn to kind of defend me I didn’t feel like he really did that. And then yesterday he didn’t - I didn’t feel like anyone was kind of vouching for me.”

Although Passino was depicted on the show as having a very close relationship with his coach and mentor, he couldn’t help but feel that when the time came to convince America to vote for him during his performance, he did more harm than good. The following night, when it was down to the five-minute live save, he joked that the coach’s comments on his cover of “Uptown Funk” felt more like a eulogy than a plea for America to put him through to the next round.

With the future ahead of him, Passino says that the next step is to regroup after the whirlwind that was his time on “The Voice.” After that, sadly, he’s torn between going back to school and finishing his degree, or making some kind of pivotal move in music while his iron is still hot. Although his confidence is somewhat shaken by his time on the show, as well as his inability to avoid reading negative comments and reviews about his work, he says that he doesn’t feel he was mistreated by his coach. In fact, he credits Williams with giving him a ton of knowledge about navigating the music industry and being an artist for the future.

“This show is about positivity and it’s never about controversy, and there’s no controversial things that ever happen on the show. So Pharrell is very respectful and I just think it was my time. It was the decision, it was my time to go this week unfortunately.”

“The Voice” will return on Monday to see the remaining top 9 perform for a chance to stay alive as Season 10 continues.