Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Remember Chris Jamison, third-place finisher from Season 7 of The Voice?

Nearly two years after he starred on the show, pre-orders are under way for his debut EP.

Though Chris was signed to Republic Records after The Voice, the EP is being released independently.

That’s part of the long and sometimes frustrating journey the 22-year-old from Pittsburgh has been on since The Voice.

It’s a journey he shares in a revealing Podcast that you can listen to — and should — for free on iTunes.

In that Podcast, Chris calls his experience on The Voice fantastic, but says he was too shy and too afraid of screwing up his golden opportunity to speak out when he wasn’t comfortable with something.

The result: By the end of the show, he’d been typecast “as this sex symbol, lady’s man, heartthrob kind of guy … But that wasn’t me at all.”

Naturally, when he arrived at the record label, they expected The Voice version of Chris Jamison. And so they asked him to record songs that fit that image.

So Chris would fly out to L.A. to record songs written by other people; the label was never satisfied with the end result, he said.

And he spent a lot of time sitting on the couch in his parents’ Pittsburgh home. He calls it both remarkable and depressing that he was able to watch more than 200 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy in a month.

“I was signing songs written by other people about things I couldn’t connect with because they weren’t a reflection of who I am,” he says. “I had just come off a show where I sang covers every week, and this wasn’t anything different. I was creating my debut project, but it wasn’t me at all.

“This whole thing was incredibly frustrating. I had all this momentum from the show and I was watching it fade away, week after week, month after month.”

Earlier this year, Chris and the record label parted ways. That’s when he began working on the EP, one on which he wrote “every single song.”

That four-track EP is called, appropriately, “I Am Chris Jamison.” Anyone pre-ordering it on iTunes will get an immediate download of a song called “Better Man,” which is clearly autobiographical.

“Every song is 100 percent me,” Chris says of his debut project. “I have returned to the Chris Jamison that God created me to be and I don’t ever plan on being anyone different.”

The full EP will be available Aug. 19.