The best part of Moorestown native Courtney Halpin MacBride’s job is helping young performers find themselves and find the confidence to feel brave on stage.
“Being able to connect to songs and have people feel what you’re singing, that’s the cool part about being an artist…connecting to the people who are watching you and listening to you,” she said.
MacBride didn’t start singing live until she was in elementary school. She always knew that she could sing, but she was shy when it came to performing on stage. In sixth grade she sang in the Upper Elementary School talent show, and she discovered that she loved it. After that, she started doing theater at William Allen Middle School and that rolled over to high school. While she was a student at Moorestown High, MacBride worked with two different voice teachers – one based in Atlantic City and the other in Cherry Hill – and when she was a senior, she started writing and recording her own music.
After she graduated from high school, MacBride attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. All through college she remained tight with her hometown roots performing in summer musicals for MoorArts, a local nonprofit dedicated to supporting the fine and performing arts in Moorestown Township Public Schools and throughout the community. Berklee is where everything started taking off for MacBride, and it’s where she made tons of connections in the music industry. After college MacBride moved to Los Angeles around 2016, where she was performing all over the city, writing her own music and writing music for television shows. She lived there for about two-and-a-half years before she and her husband moved to Haddon Township.
In April 2020 she ended up getting a spot on NBC’s “Songland,” a songwriting competition series that served as a destination for songwriters to compete for a chance to have their work selected by a major recording artist, and three years later, MacBride secured a spot on Team Reba on season 24 of NBC’s “The Voice.” Between both shows, MacBride started teaching voice, singing techniques, performance skills and songwriting for children and adults. She obviously loves performing, singing and writing, but for her, teaching is different.
“There’s something about teaching people to sing and perform and help develop their skills in different musical ways that’s… I was kind of shocked at how much I really liked it and from there it flourished,” MacBride said.
MacBride’s students performed a variety of pop, rock and Broadway hits for the local community at the Moorestown Recreation Center on Oct. 3. The event was hosted by MoorArts, an organization who’s been a part of MacBride’s life since 2005. To this day, she continues to partner with them to put on performances around the area and she enjoys seeing how they keep the fine and performing arts thriving.
Right now, MacBride loves where she’s at with teaching. She always advises her students that if they really want to be a singer/songwriter, do it because they love it.
“The biggest thing I tell them too is that you’re going to get a million no’s and not a lot of yeses, but you have to do it because you love it, and you have to be strong and have thick skin,” she said. “Hearing ‘no’ or not getting the parts that we want is really hard, but as long as you feel good and you love what you’re doing and you’re enjoying it, that’s all that matters.”
Moorestown native Courtney Halpin MacBride is a singer, songwriter and performer whose graced the stage of NBC’s “Songland” and “The Voice.”
The biggest thing MacBride loves to tell her students is to pursue a musical career because they love it.
