NEWSOK! Old School: From Rugrats to The Voice—How EG Daily Landed on the Singing Competition
Oct. 30 2013, Published 6:07 a.m. ET
EG Daily is finally getting the exposure she’s due as a powerhouse contestant on The Voice, but depending on your age, you’re probably already real familiar with at least one of her many TV or movie roles. She voiced the character of Tommy Pickles on the beloved Nickelodeon cartoon Rugrats, played Dottie in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and starred in the iconic 80s flick Valley Girl, among a zillion other things (the woman has the hardest working IMDB page in the biz). So why The Voice and why now? EG explains…
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OK!: Why did you decide to do something like The Voice?
EG Daily: I actually didn’t decide to do it. I’ve had an amazing, blessed career and I went through a period of time where, I don’t know if it was a little mid-life crisis, but there was a two year period where I stopped doing music. I think what triggered it was getting older. It was like, “Oh my God, I live in a town where when you become a certain age it’s dumb to try to pursue your music.” Also, I’m a mom of two teenage daughters, I don’t want to do anything that’s on the dorky side.
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OK!: So what made you pick up music again?
EGD: I sort of woke up and started recognizing different things like, “What do you love to do? What are the things you used to love to do?” I slowly started to tap back into how I used to love singing all the time. I loved writing music. I loved going country western dancing. I loved dance class. I had a friend who kept saying, “You need to do those things again.” I started to slowly get back into it—not for money, not for work but just for the joy of the art. This woman at a party asked if I would sing on a show she does called Balcony TV LA. It’s just artists singing and doing a song. Some are huge artists and some are unknowns. I said I’d do it because it was the beginning of saying yes to things.
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OK!: When did The Voice factor in?
EGD: About a month or two after I started doing Balcony TV LA, this woman that I didn’t know very well said, “I hope you’re not mad at me but I got you an audition for The Voice.” I was like, “What? They’re not going to put me on that show. I’m pretty established in the voiceover world and I’m probably older than most of the people on that show.” She said they didn’t care about where you’ve been or what you’ve done, they care about your voice—that’s all that mattered. It’s genuinely not about any of that. It’s about what you do as a singer. I did it with no intentions other than grabbing a friend of mine and saying, “Let’s go play some songs at this thing. It will be fun.” We did and it was months and months later of this audition process and then that was it. It was an incredible journey.
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OK!: Has anything surprised you about the experience?
EGD: Everything! I’ve been trying my whole life to do my music career but I never quite got the kind of exposure The Voice did for me. It was the moment in my life when I stopped trying to get the record deal, when I didn’t care about doing the music for any other reason than I just loved it. It was just really for the love of music and that turned out to be the thing that gave me the most exposure I’ve probably ever had in my career in one shot at one time. It was so bizarre. It was a huge lesson about find what you love to do and do it because out of that is when incredible things come.
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