Stefan Benz of American Idol Season 21
Idol returns to ABC on Sunday, Feb. 19 for its Season 21 premiere.
Here’s more about Stefan.
* He’s a 16-year-old pop artist, who in spite of that tender age, has already released lots of music.
* He’s from Johannesburg, South Africa, but is now L.A. based.
* At age 11, he participated in a competition called the World Championship of Performing Arts in Long Beach, Calif. The competition comes at the end of a boot camp; artists from 70 countries are eligible to compete.
* Stefan not only won, he wound up under the tutelage of music producer Manny Mijares and former Republic Records president Charlie Walk.
* Next came a single called “Cool 4 Me,” which topped he charts in South Africa, making Stefan the youngest artist (he was 12 at the time) to accomplish the feat. Stefan said he wrote the song about a 7th-grade girl he thought was too cool for him at the time.
* Since then, he’s performed on Good Day New York and at the U.S. Open and participated in his first U.S. tour last summer.
* He said he moved to the U.S. only to have Covid shut everything down. That, however, proved a blessing in disguise because it allowed him time to learn guitar, piano and hone his songwriting, Stefan says in an interview with The Buzz.
* And he’s released lots of music, including an album called “6 Doors Down” in 2021 and an EP called “How to Steal Your Girl in 5 Songs” from March 22.
* His most popular song on Spotify with more than 400,000 steams is a 2020 single called “Simplify.”
* His most recent single, “Babysitter,” dropped Jan. 27. You can check it out below. Says Stefan: “Babysitter is kind of the first song that kind of marks the beginning of me getting older and becoming more of an adult.” It’s based on real events, he adds, and a babysitter he had a crush on when he was growing up.
Stefan on social media:
Instagram
TikTok
Twitter
Facebook
YouTube
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