Idol Chatter & Voice Views

New post-Voice music out this week includes singles from Britton Buchanan, Johnny Gates and James Violet.

Here’s a bit about each of those releases.

The links take you to the songs on Apple Music. Or you can check out the Spotify snippets below.

* Britton Buchanan, runner-up from Season 14, released “October Queen,” just in time for Halloween. And the music video features more than 20 “icons of horror.” Britton actually unveiled the song, written with Derek Fuhrmann, last year, but didn’t have time to get it released by Halloween 2019. Wrote Britton: “I wanted to write a song about my adoration of the ‘scream queen,’ ‘final girl,’ whatever you want to call it. I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street when I was 10 years old and immediately fell in love with (and am still in love with) Heather Langenkamp. There was something so enthralling to 10-year-old me, who had grown up only seeing men being the heroes, to see that the only person who could beat the bad guy was a strong woman.” And he wanted to write about “outcasts,” he added, having felt like one through high school. “Anyway, this is my love letter to final girls and outcasts.”

* Johnny Gates from Season 12 released “Scotch Tape” on Friday. It’s a song he wrote with Lauren Luiz and Tyler Thompson about a couple who are a bit of a mess, but can mend anything with a little scotch tape. It’s the fourth single of 2020 from the former front man for Runaway Saints, who is now based in Nashville.

* James Violet from Season 17 was just celebrating 45,000 streams of his post-Voice EP “Don’t Send Me Flowers,” released in August. Now he’s already back with a new single called “Babyblue,” one he describes as “my best song yet.”