Source: USA TODAY
Ultimately, a suitcase made Amber Holcomb lose it.
The 19-year-old American Idol contestant had pieced herself back together after an emotional farewell performance, during which she fought a losing battle against her tears while trying to sing Whitney Houston’s I Believe in You and Me. Then she realized her suitcase wouldn’t hold all the mementos she had acquired during her time on the show. And the tears came rushing back.
“I realized I had so much crap and no bags to put it in,” Holcomb said when reached by phone Friday morning. “I kept telling myself, ‘I need to buy another suitcase, I need to buy another suitcase.’ But I never did. Now I really need one, and I don’t have one.”
When she started on Idol, Holcomb would have been happy if she had gone home while she could still fit everything in one bag.
“I just wanted my name to be out there,” she says. “I could have cared less if I got cut before the Top 10 and they just showed me on the show. I just wanted people to know my name and know who I was. As the weeks went on and I kept getting farther and farther in the competition, I was just honored. That was more and more support, more and more people on my side.”
Eventually, it came down to just four young women, who all became very close. “We were so supportive,” Holcomb says. “We love each other. At this point, whoever wins, I’ll be happy.”
During the competition, Holcomb found her biggest challenge to be overcoming over-thinking.
“I’m always in my head, so it was hard for me to step outside and dance in the group numbers and just have fun,” she says.
At the same time, her experience on the show helped her learn to tune out other voices that tried to get inside her head.
“Now I can honestly say I could care less about the negative things that people say about me,” she says. “It doesn’t even affect me. It bounces right off. This has made me a stronger person, not only inside, but I feel like I have tough, tough skin now.”
She needed that tough skin this week to shake off a potentially embarrassing moment when mentor Harry Connick Jr. quizzed her about the meaning to My Funny Valentine, revealing Holcomb hadn’t thought through the song’s lyrics.
“What Harry said, he told me to take it like a grain of salt, so that’s what I did,” she says. “When I met with him, we took it line by line.” But Holcomb takes a more instinctual approach to choosing her songs. “Me, personally, if it sounds good, then it’s automatically a good song. My song process through my head is really weird.”
The continually increasing stress of the competition may finally have taken its toll on the young singer this week. “Adding words to a song, then learning them, then being put on stage in front of millions, and the pressure, and the votes and wanting to be somewhere so bad — I feel like all that took effect.”
While her Idol run has ended, though she’ll return in just two weeks for the finale, Holcomb still has plenty of ambition to try to fit in that suitcase.
“I want to make sure that my face is everywhere people turn,” she says. “I want to be in movies, magazines, commercials. I feel like I have what it takes to do it all, not even just music. I want you to turn and, in every direction, my face be there.”
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