Last week the popular competition series American Idol came to an end after fifteen seasons. After the final vote, the winner was chosen: Trent Harmon. The singer recently sat down with the media to talk about his time on Idol and his future.

Harmon talked to SciFi Vision about what kind of album he sees himself making. “I sing blue-eyed soul. I talked it over with Mr. Scott, and he said Justin Timberlake is thinking about making a country album. So, define country in 2016. I think it could be whatever you want it to be, so we’re going to try to make an album that country supporters would pick up. Country supporters, they go to shows; they go to festivals; they buy CDs; they download stuff. If you can make it in country, you can have a career.”

In this season finale, the contestants didn’t get to sing with a lot of famous singers because a lot of Idol alums were brought back instead. If he had had the chance, Harmon told the site he would have liked to have gotten to sing with Elton John.

FOX CONFERENCE CALL
American Idol
Trent Harmon

April 8, 2016
2:45 p.m. ET

SCIFI VISION: Hi, Trent. Thanks so much for talking to us today and congratulations.

TRENT: Yes, ma’am. Thank you.

QUESTION: Last night was different than a lot of the other Idol finales were. Usually they have other singers separate from Idol come in to sing with the Top Ten or whatever. So, I’m curious, if they had done that this year, who’s somebody that you really would’ve liked to have gotten to sing with?

TRENT: Elton John.

SCIFI VISION: Great! What do you see your album looking like, the kind of music? What do you see in your future on the album?

TRENT: I sing blue-eyed soul. I talked it over with Mr. Scott, and he said Justin Timberlake is thinking about making a country album. So, define country in 2016. I think it could be whatever you want it to be, so we’re going to try to make an album that country supporters would pick up. Country supporters, they go to shows; they go to festivals; they buy CDs; they download stuff. If you can make it in country, you can have a career.

QUESTION: You were incredibly emotional after your win. How do you feel now, now that 20 hours have passed? Have you had any sleep? What’s been going through your emotional brain?

TRENT: Well, I’ve got sleep scheduled for next Friday at 2:00, but I really feel like it hasn’t sunk in yet. It hasn’t really sunk in because this morning when I hopped out of bed, I jumped in the shower, I started doing my warm ups and started practicing my song, and I realized that today I don’t have to do that anymore.

I’m kind of realizing that I can decompress a little bit at a time, and I don’t know how long it’ll take. It may take a week or a month before I really come down out of, I hate to say, like a PTSD, but I’m still kind of in that mode where I feel like at any moment I could get cut, but I can’t get cut anymore.

QUESTION: Who did you get to hang out with among the alumni yesterday after the show was over, or even before then?

TRENT: You name it. If they’ve been on the show, I got to hang out with them. Some bucket list people that I got to hang out with: I got to hang out with Jordin Sparks again; I got to talk to David Archuleta for a while; David Cook; I had a pretty long conversation with James Durbin; you name it, man. I got to talk to him last night. He was great.

QUESTION: Is it safe to say that you were surprised to win? Did you consider yourself the underdog, and also what did you say to La’Porsha as you were hugging her on stage in that moment?

TRENT: No, ma’am, I didn’t consider myself the underdog. When I auditioned in July, I didn’t expect to win, but I prepared to win at every facet of this competition.

I told La’Porsha no matter what name comes out of Ryan’s mouth, we’re going to hug until they separate us. I don’t care whose name gets called, Porsha, we just won a car, and you don’t win cars every day, so we’re going to be okay, Porsha.

QUESTION: You repeated a few times how you worked so hard this season, and I remember Scott Borchetta said in a recent interview that you were the hardest working contestant on the show. Could you elaborate on that? What did you do that went above and beyond the normal Idol requirements and rehearsal schedule?

TRENT: I wake up, go to bed, wake up in the middle of the night. If I am awake or asleep I am rehearsing. If I have two minutes to myself to do anything, I am in rehearsal mode. I didn’t know what I was doing, but that’s what it took. I was too dumb to know that I was in go mode all the time. But it paid off.

QUESTION: When you talk about blue-eyed soul, whenever you go into the falsetto, I can always hear like Smoky Robinson or Little Anthony or someone like that. I was wondering how old were you when you found out you could do that kind of a falsetto, and are there some of these old classic singers that you recall when you’re doing them?

TRENT: That’s a good question. Nobody’s ever asked me a question like that. I just really learned that I could do things with my voice that I didn’t know I could do, probably, middle to the last few years of my college experience, so just in the last two to four years. I think I always heard the notes in my head while I’d be listening to Smokey Robinson and The Miracles or I’d be listening to The Temptations.

My grandma always played a lot of Temptations and a lot of Michael Jackson, Jackson 5, back in the day when I’d be at her house and we’d be cooking, and I would hear those notes in my head that I would want to sing, but I never tried to sing them, and one day they just jumped out of my mouth.

QUESTION: I want to ask you a serious thing about the song, “Amazing Grace,” because I’ve heard about you a couple times. It was the first song you sang for your mom when you were five, and it was also the one that you sang at your friend’s funeral. That does that song mean to you, and what do you recall of those two experiences singing at those two times?

I keep “Amazing Grace” in my back pocket no matter where I go, whether it’s a Christian event that I’m at, or if it’s not. If it’s just a secular event. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because I know the words to it or because the words mean something to just about anybody whether you have any religious beliefs or not. That song means something. There’s a reason it’s called a classic. There’s a reason that all these songs that we do are called classics. I would consider that one a classic, too, and I’ve just sung it at so many different things that have meant so much to me; that one’s just special to me.

That was the first one that my mom said, “Hey Trent, sing this part right here.” And I sang it, and she said, “Well, can you switch over and sing this part right here?” And that was when she realized that I could sing harmony. When I was four or five years old, and she realizedsomething that I didn’t even realize at that early of an age.

QUESTION: Throughout your journey, throughout all of American Idol, this journey, is there anything that you were surprised to learn about yourself?

TRENT: I’ve always thought to myself that if I could ever get to the point, there’s so many intangibles that are encompassed within this reality singing competition. It’s not so much singing, there’s so much that goes into it. I would say singing would be less than 10% of it. But I knew that I could hang in the singing department, but I didn’t know that I could do interviews.

Nobody has really coached on how to talk to people in a public setting, and so sometimes, like right now, I’m talking to you having a conversation, and I’ve never done this before in my life. That has really surprised me, and it surprised my parents too. They said Trent, you’ve talked to more people through interviews than you’ve talked to us in your whole 25 years of life. Who taught you how to do that?

QUESTION: What was probably the most surreal moment for you?

TRENT: I think whenever I turned around and I saw my mom, and dad, and my sister, and my puppy dog walk out onto the stage two weeks ago, it was strange, because it was like, I’m out here. I know that I’m out here doing this, but when they walked on the stage, I was like wow. We looked good as a collective unit; as a family. We looked like we were doing stuff in the Harmon collective unit. I’m doing something for my family. So that was pretty surreal.

QUESTION: As far as the former Idols that you got to spend some time with last night and during rehearsals, were any of them able to give you any advice going forward to how to handle all of this?

TRENT: I guess, thankfully, most of the Idols that I got to talk to, they appreciated. They said, “Man, you seem pretty genuine. Don’t ever, ever quit that. Don’t ever get out of that head. Don’t ever, ever quit that.” And they didn’t give me very much advice in the moment.

I was lucky enough to exchange numbers with a lot of people that I never thought I’d have their name in my phone book, and they said look here, text me. And I could tell that they meant it. They said text me at any time of the day or night, ask me a question.

I got to exchange numbers with Jordin Sparks, and Ruben Studdard. It was just surreal for them to reach out and say, hey man, you’re the last one. We want to help you any way that we can. And I think they mean it.

QUESTION: Would moving to Nashville be a possibility for you?

TRENT: I don’t know at this point. I’m sure that I will float between Nashville and Mississippi and Arkansas for quite a while. I’ve been doing the float between two states for the last four or five years, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it if you manage your time wisely, but I’m down to live wherever I’m happy. If that happens to be in Nashville for the next few years, then I’ll live in Nashville. If that happens to be Belize, then I’ll live in Belize.

QUESTION: You came into the competition singing music on the soulful side, but you’ll be recording as a country soul artist. Could you talk a little bit about your relationship to country? Did you grow up with country? Do you have a country artist that you enjoy?

TRENT: I was just telling Mr. Scott last night. I said, man I don’t think you fully realize how much country music I listen to, because whenever I really got the opportunity to pick the song myself, 100% myself, I was doing country songs on the show.

Now that was only sprinkled in very, very rarely because we always get to pick our own songs, but there would be influence from other people as well, but I sang a couple Chris Stapletons, and at that point, I think it was fully realized that this guy is confusing enough as it is, he talks so country but then he sings like a soul singer, well now he’s actually singing country.

I’ve always enjoyed all the classics. I love Conway Twitty. I’ve always been a big Conway Twitty fan. I’m a big Elvis fan. Elvis did country. I’m a Ray Charles fan. Ray Charles made a country album. So that’s kind of a point in case right there.

Define what country is in 2016. I mean, Ray Charles kind of broke that statement a long time. Justin Timberlake’s working on a country album. So, I feel like with being able to sing multiple genres is going to help me moving forward to make a country album that would be palatable to a lot of different people.

QUESTION: Are you a songwriter, and if so, do you plan to co-write for your album?

TRENT: I am a songwriter, but that will be decided by the Powers That Be. I don’t always have to have the best idea coming from myself. I just want the best idea. So, we’ll have to see where it leads us.

QUESTION: When Simon Cowell returned and he said he’d give some advice and when you said that for the Idols not to forget the people who voted for you, did you happen to meet Simon? And did he give you any advice?

TRENT: Unfortunately, I did not get to meet Mr. Simon, and I am still pretty upset about that to tell you the truth. I was in the dressing room watching it from my television in the dressing room, so I really can’t give a lot of input to that. I wanted to meet him real, real bad. Worse than you probably know, but I didn’t get the chance to.

QUESTION: In your redo performance, you sang “Chandelier,” and it really seemed that you had sealed the deal. Anything that stood out that Sia said to you that you’ll take with you for the rest of your career?

TRENT: Sia said that she wrote this song from a state of struggling with alcoholism and that if I had a family member that struggled with alcoholism that that would be a route that I could sing that song from. And while I did lose a family member this year that struggled with alcoholism, I tried to go down that path and it was just too morbid. It was too sad. I didn’t want to. I sang it from a happy state.

When I asked her, I said, “Can I do that? This is your song.” She said “This is your song. For 90 seconds, this is your song. You sing it however you want to sing it.” And I don’t think she meant for that just to apply to “Chandelier.” I think she was telling me to take that forward for the rest of my life. Even though I might be doing a cover song at some point, don’t sing it just as from the same head that the person that wrote it or performed it and made it popular from. Pick something from it. Find a lyric in it.

My favorite lyric from the Parson James song that I sang last week was, “It’s enough of a fight just staying alive anyways,” and I told Parson that. I said, “Man, that’s my favorite line in the song,” and he said, “Really? That’s crazy.” You just find a line that pulls to you. Pulls on your heart strings, and you go with it.

QUESTION: After you had won, you had said that it was important for you to work so hard, and I know you said you didn’t want to take it for granted, but was that the main reason why you said that? Why was it so important for you to have worked so hard?

TRENT: I am fully aware that I have a God-given ability, but I didn’t want to coast off of that. I didn’t want to coast for the remainder of the season after my first audition. I didn’t want to just coast off of a pretty voice. I think if I had, I may haven’t been able to make it pretty deep into the competition, but I knew that if I pushed myself and I worked hard and worked really, really, really, really hard, I could be better than just a pretty voice.

I practiced interviews, I practiced wardrobe, I practiced how to hold the microphone. I didn’t just take for granted having the ability to sing. I practiced every different angle that I could to be good; to be good and then to be better and then to be the best.

QUESTION: It was heartwarming to watch you thank your family and God when you won last night. We would love to know how your love for God and your family has played a role when you’re singing, and how that comes through in your performances with all the emotions and everything.

TRENT: First of all, if anyone has made it through what I consider, I’d say the only two jobs that I would consider to be tougher than making it through American Idol boot camp, which is what I have aptly named it after the show’s been over, would be a preacher and/or a soldier. That would be the only two jobs that I would consider to be harder than what we just completed.

But if you can go through what we just did and not believe in something - I happen to believe in God, and then I would pray. Had a really simple prayer, I would say, especially when I had mono because I was pretty quarantined from the rest of the cast. I would say well, it’s just me and you. It’s just me and you God, and I kept that on my brain at all times when I didn’t have anybody else.

I didn’t have my parents out here with me, and it was just me, so I feel like if you could make it through this competition without believing in something, I wouldn’t say I’m impressed, I would say I’m kind of scared because I don’t know what you are. You’re super human, because I couldn’t have done it without Him. That’s for sure.

MODERATOR: Did you have any closing remarks?

TRENT: ...Thank you to anyone that voted.

I only have one phone and one tablet, and I did not do this. All I did was show up and sing. The things that were written in the press and the people that voted multiple and multiple and multiple times across different respective states in the United States, they did this, and I just want to make them proud, and I appreciate it.