It is a serendipitous day to catch up with St. Louis singing sensation Joanna Serenko. As we sit down in a Webster Groves coffee and garden shop earlier this month, it is not only the one-year anniversary of the release of her debut album, Best of Me, but also the day Neil Salsich has gone public with the news that he will be a contestant on the upcoming season of NBC's The Voice.
Serenko knows a little something about that experience.
As an 18-year-old fresh out of Kirkwood High School, Serenko competed on Season 18 of The Voice in 2020 and, like Salsich, received a four-chair turnaround during her blind audition. Serenko went on to make the semifinal round, finishing in ninth place overall.
However, when it comes to the timing of our interview, Serenko expresses trepidation that it's too early for a profile on her. "Honestly, when you hit me up for this interview, I thought there would be so many better times later when I have my shit together, and I'm graduated and I know what I want to do with my life," she says.
Serenko, though, doesn't give herself enough credit. Her shit? Together. And she knows precisely what she wants to do with her life.
It's true that she's young. She was born when George W. Bush was president. She graduated from high school in — get this — 2019. She has yet to turn 22.
Which makes it all the more remarkable how quickly she has ascended the ranks of local singers. Everybody in town wants her on stage, in the studio, in the band. If phones still rested on hooks, Joanna's would be ringing off of one.
Moreover, Serenko has always sung and written like someone well beyond her years. The judges on The Voice were flabbergasted to find out that the singer with that kind of tone and control was only 18.
Her voice started to catch attention while at Kirkwood High. By her sophomore year, Serenko was posting clips of herself singing and playing covers to YouTube, attracting the attention of touring singer-songwriter Sean Coray, who asked Serenko to open for him on his St. Louis stop.
"His manager was like covers are great — you can do a few of those — but we really want more original stuff," she says. "I had already accepted the gig, so I was like, 'Oh shit, I have to write some music!' So that was the jumpstart of my writing."
That show led to more area gigs and her first audition for The Voice at 16. Serenko showed up at a massive Busch Stadium cattle call and made the first round of callbacks but no further, ending her hopes of appearing on the show. Or so she thought.
Still, she continued to gig while in high school, occasionally singing with local country act Wildfire, featuring singer/guitarist Tyler Dale. Sorenko and Dale have been a romantic and musical couple since.
"He's my person," Sorenko says with affection.
With Dale in tow, Sorenko continued to grow as a writer and performer. "Tyler went to SIUE for jazz performance, so he has all the theory," she says. "I always played by ear, so he helped with different chords and arrangements, and it became really fun to write with him."
The summer after high school, a video clip from a pop-up apartment concert sponsored by SoFar Sounds put Serenko back on the radar of The Voice's producers, who invited her back for a private audition in Louisville.
This time, Serenko sailed through the auditions and made the show.
As the show was set to tape in August, she found herself at a crossroads. "At this point, I was deciding if I was going to college or not," she says. "The Voice was a blessing. It got me out of choosing what school I was going to. I was like, 'OK, I've got one more year. I'm going to take a gap year and do this show.'"
Sequestered in an L.A. hotel, Serenko headed into feverish rounds of additional weed-out sessions and the eventual televised blind audition — a show-stopping rendition of the Beatles' "All My Loving." Serenko picked Nick Jonas as her coach, but over subsequent weeks of the show's various battle and knockout rounds ended up being coached in turn by John Legend and Blake Shelton.
"I wish I got more time with my coaches off-camera," Serenko says. "They make it seem like you get way more time with the coaches than you do. I probably got like 20 minutes with them. I never got to bro-hang. I was on camera any time I was with them."
Her favorite moment? Meeting James Taylor, who helped Serenko prepare to sing John Prine's "Angel from Montgomery," a song Serenko had learned from Bonnie Raitt's version. "It was one of the best moments of my life," she gushes. "He is such a sweet man, and I just love him so much. He told me that Bonnie would be so proud. I'll never forget that."
Then, in the middle of the season, COVID-19 hit and scattered the contestants back to their hometowns to compete remotely. "They gave us a Pelican case full of equipment, and we had to set up a home studio and have all these Zoom meetings on how to do it," she says. "It was a lot of work."
Still, when it was all over, Serenko loved every part of her experience on The Voice. "I don't regret anything," she says. "It all worked out perfectly. It was like a dream."
With the show over and nowhere to sing during the pandemic, Serenko went back to Plan B. "I come from a family of nurses," she says. "I really care for people, and I'm passionate about health and learning about the body," she says on her decision to enroll in nursing school at Maryville University.
However, once live music started coming back, Serenko found herself in high demand. Sean Canan brought her on stage to reprise "Angel From Montgomery" for Voodoo John Prine in Tower Grove Park. Dave Grelle recruited her for his Playadors comeback shows. The Mighty Pines had her channel Shania Twain during their '90s-themed New Year's Eve show.
But as much as Serenko specializes in stage-stealing cameos, she became a fully formed solo artist with the blisteringly beautiful Best of Me, her 2022 album recorded in New York City and St. Louis and featuring a collection of original songs that date as far back as high school.
Everyone knew Serenko could sing, but Best of Me established her as a remarkable songwriter as well, full of breeze-borne melodies, graceful lyricism and gorgeous arrangements. Filled with '70s-era Laurel Canyon jazz-pop and sultry shag-carpet soul, Best of Me is a stunning showcase of Serenko's preternatural musical prowess.
In addition to her smoky tone and buttery phrasing, Serenko's singing soars due to her old-school feel for when to hold back. "I think it's cool when you can do runs and things but have restraint with it and do it when it's tasteful and put it in all the right places, learning not to detract from the song," she says.
Serenko tries to extend that sense of restraint beyond music. "Sometimes simplicity is where it's at," she says. "I find that true in life, too. Simplicity is key."
When she talks, she likes to throw in those kinds of philosophical and spiritual nuggets. "I've always had a connection with a higher power, a sense of spiritualism," she says. "I like to believe everything happens for a reason, but I understand why some people don't believe that."
Take the release date of Best of Me: 2/22/22. "I like all those little angel numbers," she says. "They represent potential. Whenever I see those numbers, I think the best is still ahead of me, like I'm on the right track."
She sounds determined to make it happen. Currently at work on Dale's first album, Serenko promises that the two of them are going places, figuratively and literally. "We want to have two albums out each and then travel around the country together."
To prove her enthusiasm, Serenko takes out her phone and shows me pictures of her and Dale with their dog and plays me songs from Tyler's project. It's all enough to make it easy to forget that Serenko is also currently in nursing school.
"I do feel like I am spread thin in both areas right now," she says, with a year to go before she graduates. "But music has always been it for me. That's ultimately what I want my main thing to be."
However she finds the balance, one thing is clear. Joanna Serenko will continue to give the world the best of herself.
Joanna Serenko will play the Dark Room at the Grandel (3610 Grandel Square, 314-549-9990, kranzbergartsfoundation.org/the-dark-room) at 10 p.m. on Saturday, March 25. Tickets are $15 or $25.
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