Source: USA TODAY
I’d been looking forward to talking with Paul Jolley again — I had just hoped it’d be a few more weeks down the line.
I first met the singer from Dresden, Tenn., in 2011, when he won a singing competition I judged at Beech Bend Park in Bowling Green, Ky. Since he was the first American Idol finalist I had known outside the show, I was pulling for him a little harder than usual.
I especially enjoyed seeing how much Jolley took the comments of Jimmy Iovine and the show’s judges to heart. Each week, you could see him taking their advice and working to improve his performances.
“I take everything they say so seriously,” says Jolley, reached by phone in the studio of Good Day LA. “They’ve been in the industry for years. They’re the ones we learn from. They’re clearly staying on the charts, so they’re the ones I should be taking pointers from. Everything they’ve said just means so much to me.”
Jolley says he felt like he knew how to connect with his songs from the start, but keeping his focus got hard “when you had, like, 10 different cameras to look at in the room, and you have to watch for the red dot so you’ll know which camera to look at.” He feels like he got better after hearing the judges’ comments to him, but he knows he still had room to improve, especially when it came to the cameras, “because I’m so new to that.”
For Jolley, the high point of his Idol experience was “gaining fans and followers. Before, I had a family supporting me, but I never had the following like I have now.”
After a week of media that will include a Tonight Show appearance tonight, followed by bookings on Live With Kelly & Michael Monday and NBC’s Today show Tuesday, Jolley says he plans to contact some people from the music industry who have reached out to him and begin preparing for the tour and the next phase of his career.
“I will be bigger than what I am right now,” he says. “When you’re doing this, there’s only room to grow from here on out. But if you give up, that’s when you disappear. And I’m not one to give up.”
Jolley describes his fellow Idol finalists as “this big family, which becomes one body of people,” even though “we’re all so different. We all had different raisings, where we’re from, living situations.”
As an example of the “family” dynamic, he describes a night where all the singers gathered in one room, sat in a circle and shared the stories that made them happiest.
“It was nice to see everyone break down and show their hearts,” he says. “We know each other so well now. It means a lot more knowing that we’re going on tour together, and that we’re going to be that much closer.
That night, Jolley shared stories from a two-week mission trip he took to the Honduras when he was 16.
“It was a life-changing experience for me,” he says. “It made me realize that I want to be an inspiration to everyone. I want to be someone that people can look up to. I want to be able to make a change and make a difference in the world. Even though I didn’t win American Idol, I’m still someone’s American Idol.
“Being there, on that mission trip, we built 31 homes in two weeks. every day we built, and, also, every day we did VBS. Also, we went to the hospitals, the AIDS orphanage and the blind orphanage — all these difference places.
“It’s just amazing, if you’re positive and you have faith and you believe in things, how much you can do.”
Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.