You probably won’t believe it after watching her joy-hop her way through the Savannah audition episode, but Ashlee Altise says she was shy in high school.
Clearly, she’s over that. If her audition wasn’t enough to convince you of that, check out the interview footage below. Stick with it, Ashlee sings a snippet of a song near the end.
Turns out, Ashlee has been singing for quite some time. And she had tried out for Idol twice before, only to be turned away.
She describes that as a “big disappointment” in her golden ticket interview, but says she didn’t give up on music, she just tried to make it big in other ways.
Turns out the third time was the charm on Idol, with the help of a dance-filled rendition of “Come Together” that had Randy Jackson calling her “the right kind of crazy.”
Well, Ashlee had already promised to bowl over the judges with a combination of funk, energy and confidence. Shyness be gone.
At 28, Ashlee is in her last year of Idol eligibility. She attended Lenoir Community College and has a daughter, Blessed, who is in third grade, according to this item on NBC17 of Raleigh, N.C. Ashlee hails from Wilson, N.C.
In her golden ticket interview, Ashlee stressed that music “isn’t something that I just do for fun.” She’s pursuing music, she says, to provide a better life for her daughter.
You can hear 10 of her pre-Idol songs at this now-dormant MySpace page. You can hear more on her YouTube channel, though the video quality isn’t very good. On Facebook, she classifies her music as R&B, funk, oldskool and soul.
Now, here’s her Idol audition, plus the promised interview clip.
Pre-Idol interview
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