Javier Colon's Second Chance

Waking up to a beautiful morning in Northern California, West Hartford’s Javier Colon had a concern not a lot of singers have - his golf handicap. This is because after his scheduled show in California he was taking off for Greenville, South Carolina to compete in the BMW Charity Pro-Am. “I used to be like a six handicap,” he says, “now it’s more like a fifteen.” Colon has a pretty good excuse for letting his golf game slide, he’s been busy touring the country and being one of the breakout stars of NBC’s singing competition The Voice.

Colon, who attended Bunnell High School in Stratford and the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, made his first appearance on The Voice on the show’s premier. His acoustic soul rendition of “Time After Time” wowed all of the judges, and the national audience. The latter quickly found Colon online. “I went from having like 400 Twitter followers to now having about 7,000” he says, still slightly in awe of it all. His Facebook fan page recently surpassed 10,000 “likes.”

Support is something Colon’s felt from his home state for quite a while. This is why he wanted to schedule this Thursday’s show at the Ridgefield Playhouse. “They’ve been so behind me and it feels so good, so I just wanted to make sure I did something for the hometown crowd.”

This isn’t Colon’s first time in the limelight. In 2003 he had a hit single, “Crazy,” on Capitol Records, and he thought that the world was about to be his oyster. “I felt when I first signed, I’m like it’s Capitol Records, this is huge, I’m gonna be all set from here on out.” Unfortunately for Colon, “things just didn’t go the way we wanted to.”

His “we” started to grow. Now with a wife and two daughters, some realities about music started to set in. “Towards the last few months here it wasn’t paying the bills like it should.” Then came the audition for The Voice. Colon says the entire process has “breathed new life into what I’m doing.” What Colon’s been doing has breathed excitement into the coaches, most notably Maroon 5’s Adam Levine. “Adam was almost distracting because he was so pumped about what I was doing on stage and he was not afraid to show it. That really drew my attention.” Levine’s reaction played a large part in Colon choosing him as his coach. “On top of the fact that he’s extremely talented, to take that and couple it with how excited he was was why I made my decision to go with him.”

Now with a second chance at being a full time recording artist Colon says he’s going to apply the lessons he learned the first time around. He adds he’s going to do one other thing, as well. “I’m just gonna be myself. I owe that to myself, if I’m gonna have another shot, if I’m fortunate enough, to be myself and see what happens. Hopefully that will be enough.”

Story originally ran in the FairfieldWeekly.