Idol Chatter & Voice Views

We can expect new music from Lancaster’s James Wolpert, a Season 5 standout on The Voice, in the not-too-distant future.

James just completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to help fund a debut album.

He was looking to raise $25,000; he raised nearly $27,000 with the help of 660 backers.

Since finishing in the Top 5 on The Voice, James has been spending lots of time in Nashville working on his debut project.

And it sounds like it will feature exclusively songs he’s written.

He calls the material he’s preparing for the new album “deeply personal” and says it “marks the turbulence of the last few years of my life.”

He’s been working on the album with Grammy-award winning music engineer Vance Powell and says that means the record will be done “the old-fashioned way” with “no pitch correction, no automation, no gizmos getting into the way of the performance that’s going into the mic.”

“It’s turning out wonderfully,” James says in his Kickstarter video. “These songs have been realized in a way that not even I could have imagined.”

No word on a release date, but the estimated delivery date noted on his campaign page is July 2014.

was 22 when he auditioned for The Voice. He’s the singer who went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to study art, then put that on hold to pursue music.

It worked well on The Voice. He turned four chairs with his blind audition, landed on Team Adam and finished just shy of the finals.

Since then he’s also performed a homecoming show at the American Music Theatre in Lancaster, Pa., with fellow Season 5 contestant Cole Vosbury.

How did that go?

Well, the first show sold out so quickly, a second was added. You can hear one of the originals he performed during those shows at right.