Late 'AGT' and 'Voice' veteran Nolan Neal's daughter honors dad with 'Idol' audition: 'It could have been so different. He didn’t mean to die.'

“Seeing my dad in the music industry actually made me not want to pursue music for a long time,” 24-year-old Cay Aliese confessed Sunday on American Idol. “But since his passing, it feels like all I want to do is music. … I’m just sad, because it could have been so different. He didn’t mean to die. He was a light to other people, but he couldn’t find that for himself.”

Avid talent-show watchers probably remember Cay’s father, Nolan Neal, very well. He first came to The Voice Season 10 with a tragic backstory. A few years prior, the Nashville troubadour — who had been signed to both Hollywood Records and to Virgin Records in 2006, and briefly fronted rock band Hinder in 2014 — got in a heated phone conversation with his own father about his struggles in the music business and hung up in anger. His dad tried to call back a few times, but Nolan refused to answer, and the two never spoke again: Nolan’s father died by suicide soon after their falling out. The guilt-stricken singer-songwriter then began “downward-spiraling,” partying so hard that he damaged his voice and lost his record deal while in the middle of making his album.

Although Nolan didn’t turn any Voice chairs the first time around, when the tenacious musician returned for Season 11 a few months later, he was a four-chair success and appeared to be on track to win the entire show — before getting cut in one of the most shocking Knockouts in The Voice history. In 2020, he triumphantly returned to TV on America’s Got Talent and poured his pain into a gritty original ballad called “Lost” (the first song he wrote after getting sober, which he was at that time), and he received a standing ovation. AGT judge Sofia Vergara, whose younger brother has a much-publicized history with drugs and alcohol, even tearfully told Nolan, “I know very well the sickness of addiction. My family is completely full of this horrific sickness, and I totally understand. And to be here tonight and to hear that song, for me, it gives me a lot of hope.”

Nolan was again shockingly eliminated in the AGT Season 15 Quarterfinals, and in July 2022, he died of a drug overdose, only a few months before Cay’s American Idol audition. On Sunday, Cay told Idol judges Katy Perry, Lionel Richie, and Luke Bryan that her father “kind of kept blowing” his professional chances due to his addiction and was “in and out” of her life for much of her childhood, “but the one thing that I always connected with him was music. … That was my favorite thing, sharing music with him.”

Cay explained that trying out for Idol — the talent show she said “has her heart,” as opposed to AGT or The Voice — felt “like I’m honoring my dad and I’m closing his chapter, but starting my own.” She then shared an original dedication to her father, “City of Nashville,” which she penned about the “city of music where [they] made our memories” and would “jam out in the studio for fun, writing songs about all the things we’ve done.”

Interestingly, Katy was “on the fence” about Cay because she “didn’t think the emotion was there,” and Lionel also told Cay, “You’ve got a voice, but I gotta get it to sound like you care that you’re going to do this.” I understood their point. Unlike many hard-luck Idol singers who barely make it through their auditions without bursting into tears, Cay did have a guard up, a sort of flat affect — most likely the result of years of having to process and protect herself as a child of an unreliable parent. But I think that emotion is in there.

For instance, last year Nolan's Facebook page posted a video of Cay singing Nolan's original "Send Me a Butterfly" at what appeared to be his memorial service, and it was certainly an Idol-worthy performance. That same year on Instagram, Cay posted another original ballad about her late dad as well as a confession about her own urges to turn to drugs and alcohol during this difficult period of mourning. And in January 2023, she posted: "This is the first year I know I can’t call my dad. It’s the first year I’ll never have another argument with him. I know I won’t get a call from him asking about Jesus or wanting to write a song together. ... I just wish things could’ve been different for my dad. I wish I could go back and change some things. But I can’t. So I’m walking this grieving process out the best way I know how. And that’s through Jesus + writing music. Dad would be so happy to know I’m making music right now."

In that same January 2023 Instagram caption, Cay wrote, "2022 broke me" and "I don’t know what 2023 will bring," but for now, 2023 will bring her closer to her own musical dream — because the judges eventually believed enough in her potential to hand her a Golden Ticket. “If my dad was here, he’d be happy,” Cay reflected in this bittersweet moment. “Hopefully he’s cheering me on. Doing this has given me a chance to honor my dad and walk a path that my dad didn’t get to walk.”

These were Sunday's other successful Idol auditions:

Dany Epp, 23: “The One That Got Away”