Carrie Underwood is revealing one of the most important pieces of advice she feels like she gave the recent contestants on American Idol. The words of wisdom Underwood imparted came from her own experience of being on American Idol in 2005, when she was crowned the Season 4 winner.
“I gave this to the contestants this year,” Underwood tells SiriusXM‘s Cody Alan. “I’m like, ‘Just stay off social media. Stay off social media.’ Post and ghost. Back when I was on the show, it was all message boards, and people would be having these in-depth conversations/arguments over who was the worst, who was the best, who should go home, who shouldn’t. And you would just scroll through it, horrified. So it’s a lot. And for some of these kids, they’re newer to social media.
“You would watch their followers go from a couple hundred to thousands and thousands, so there was a lot coming at them,” she adds. “I felt like I was always back there, like, ‘You okay? Everything good? How’s your family?'”
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Underwood might have been the winner of American Idol two decades ago, but it wasn’t an entirely positive experience for her. So when Underwood was a judge this year, alongside Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie, the mother of two vowed to do things much differently than Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul, who were the judges her season.
“When I was on the show 20 years ago – I feel like this would never happen today – but we would get negative comments,” Underwood recalls. “And it would be like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this. You just told me it was really bad, but I don’t really know why, and I don’t really know how to fix tit.’ So I feel like as a judge, I want everyone to have the best chance of staying on the show as long as humanly possible.
“So I feel like when they would get in front of me, I would be like, ‘Okay. Here is something we can work on,'” she continues. “‘Cause I would hate it if we told them that they’re picking the wrong songs, but we didn’t really help them, and then they picked the super wrong song, and then got voted off. It was important to me to tell them things that could help them. I feel like, for me, I learned so much when I was on the show.”
Underwood’s experience on American Idol might have been much different than this year’s contestants. Still, the 42-year-old is profoundly thankful for her time on the reality TV talent show.
“I owe my career to American Idol,” Underwood tells People. “It has been such an important part of my life, and I will always be grateful for that. Coming back as a judge 20 years later is such a special full-circle moment for me, and it’s meant a lot to share that journey with the people that have been there from the beginning, as well as a whole new generation of Idol fans.”
Photo Credit: Courtesy of ABC / Christopher Willard