Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Check out this Tweet from RaeLynn: “Get it girl!!! Thank you for singing #Careless. I know who I’m cheering on.”

Emily, a 17-year-old country songstress, is one of the most promising returning singers on American Idol Season 15.

A year ago, she made it all the way to the Top 48 and the House of Blues episode before being eliminated.

But Season 14 of Idol hardly marked the start of Emily’s country music career.

She’d already been performing for five years and had opened for the likes of Jason Aldean and former Idol standout Casey James.

In 2010, she won the Texaco Country Showdown in Florida. A year later, she released her debut album, “Right Here, Right Now,” which is still available on iTunes.

Still, the Idol elimination was a tough setback, Emily said in a recent interview with the Palm Beach Post.

“I told my mom on the plane back that I wasn’t going to be able to look at the pictures from that trip for a long time,” Emily said.

“But my mom was always trying to make sure I stayed positive. She said, ‘If you wanna go back, you’ve got to do the work.’

So Emily kept right on performing. A couple of weeks before her audition aired, she opened for Charles Kelly of Lady Antebellum and got to perform a duet with Kelsea Ballerini.

As for Idol …

“I’m here to prove to the judges that since last season, I’ve been working super hard and just getting better at everything they said I shoudl work on,” Emily said in her pre-audition interview.

Mission accomplished. Jennifer Lopez commented on how much she seemed to improve. So did Harry Connick Jr., who called her audition “the best of the day,” adding “I like you a lot better than I did last year.

You can follow Emily through Facebook or her website. On Twitter, she is @emilybrookestar.

Here are a couple samples of Emily’s music. You can hear more on her YouTube channel.

“Love Me Like You Mean It” — Kelsea Ballerini cover

“We Were Us” — Keith Urban cover with former Idol contestant Riley Bria

An oldie “Party in the Pool” from her debut album