Hear more from La’Porsha Renae of American Idol Season 15

American Idol Season 15

Hear more from La’Porsha Renae of American Idol Season 15

January 12, 2016 By Mark Franklin 0

of the most talked about auditions from night two of American Idol came from a 22-year-old call representative from McCall, Mississippi.

La’Porsha Renae delivered a frill-filled version of Radiohead’s “Creep” that sounded nothing like the original, but clearly pleased the Idol judges.

Keith Urban said he loved La’Porsha’s fresh take on the song. Harry Connick Jr. called her an “assassin with runs” and said “she destroyed it.”

And La’Porsha breezed to Hollywood on a 3-0 vote from the judges.

This wasn’t La’Porsha’s first attempt at American Idol. She told her hometown newspaper, The Clarion-Ledger that she auditioned when she was 16, but wasn’t ready for the big stage.

“All I can say is I’m more seasoned, more torn down,” she said in an interview you can read here. “I’m more emotional and more prepared. Life has kind of gotten to me, but at 16 I hadn’t gone through much of anything to convey through music on stage.”

She explained a little about how life got to her during her pre-audition interview on Idol. Married at 18, La’Porsha says she was in an abusive relationship. Finally, she says she left and moved into a shelter with her daughter for their safety.

“If I couldn’t sing about it, I don’t think I would have survived it,” she said about the experience. “If I couldn’t find a song to express what I felt at that moment, I wrote one.”

We also got to meet her daughter, Nayalee, on Idol. Jennifer Lopez held her while mom auditioned.

That actually made the audition less nerve-wracking than it might have been otherwise, La’Porsha said in the newspaper interview.

Oh, and this time around, she wasn’t going to take a “no” from American Idol.

“I drove 28 hours with my mom and daughter to Providence, Rhode Island to try out. If I hadn’t made it I had plans to drive to each city until I got a yes,” she said.

La’Porsha hasn’t released any original music, but I’ve embedded a couple of her covers below.

You can follow her through her website and Facebook page. On Twitter — where she’s already gotten shout-outs from Kelly Clarkson and Season 14 standout Clark Beckham — she is @KokumoAsha.

Cover of Katy Perry’s “Roar”