Emily Ann Roberts is the first to admit that if it was up to her, she would have rushed out a bunch of new music immediately after finishing second on The Voice in 2015.

Fortunately, she got good advice and was smart enough to take it.

The Season 9 runner-up is having a moment that very few finalists on the show ever have, in large part because she waited. Songs like her newest release “The Fence” are of a quality a still-wet reality singer is rarely capable of, especially one who is 16 years old.

With help from Blake Shelton and his team, Roberts has developed into a mature singer-songwriter who has shed the stigma of being a TV show finalist.

Related: 12 Things The Voice Wishes We Didn’t Know

• Emily Ann Roberts finished second to Jordan Smith during Season 9 of The Voice.
• A deluxe version of her Can’t Hide Country album was released in 2024.
• Popular songs on Spotify include “He Set Her Off,” “Chickens,” “Whole Lotta Little” and “Easy Does It.”

“It started everything for me, but it does kind of haunt me,” Roberts tells Taste of Country of the show.

She doesn’t need to explain herself — you can count on one hand the number of The Voice finalists who’ve enjoyed long-lasting success. Even fewer are the stars with hits on country radio.

Roberts began working with Shelton’s manager Narvel Blackstock after the show ended, and his first piece of advice was to pump the brakes.

“That was the first thing he said to me,” she recalls. “He was like, ‘You are 16 years old. You have your whole life ahead of you, and we’re not going to rush this.'”

Blackstock and his team (which still includes Shelton, with whom Roberts toured in 2025) held her to a high standard and at times were very hard on her. Now 27 years old, she says she’s grateful for it.

The truth is, she didn’t have a great example to look up to otherwise. There was no auntie who used to have a record deal or father’s friend who played session guitar in Nashville. Add in youth and you get the ingredients for a career that typically finds every trap.

The fast road is a fast road to burnout.

That would have poisoned a dream that began so pure. While Roberts admits she didn’t really have the confidence to believe she could make a career out of singing until after the NBC reality show, she always wanted it. Growing up, her grandmother had Alzheimer’s disease, and she remembers the last thing that she lost was the music.

“If we started singing … she would know every word and jump in and sing along with us,” the East Tennessee native says, with the same thick accent fans heard on TV. “And that changed my life.”

In 2025, the script has flipped. She’s the one the next generation of family is looking up to.

“I have nieces and nephews and I have heard so many of them say, ‘When I grow up, I wanna be a songwriter like Aunt Emily,'” Roberts reveals, getting a bit emotional. “That means so much to me, because I can look at them and say, ‘Yes, you can.'”