Jackie Evancho follows her heart
‘AGT’ champ has ear for ‘older-fashioned’ songs
And she opens it, too, with arrival of Broadway-themed “The Debut”
Jackie Evancho is celebrating her album release week in a way that’d make any star with a booked-solid schedule jealous – by heading back to her hometown.
USA TODAY caught up with the “America’s Got Talent” winner on the eve of her 19th birthday as she traveled to her family home in Pittsburgh to celebrate with them. Evancho, who has been a full-time New Yorker since January in between her tour dates and recent appearances on “America’s Got Talent: The Champions,” has a new album of modern Broadway covers, “The Debut,” out Friday. The album features songs from “Rent” and “Wicked“as well as her take on “The Greatest Showman” hit “A Million Dreams.” “The Debut” follows her 2017 release “Two Hearts,” which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Classical Albums chart, marking Evancho’s seventh consecutive release to reach the top of that chart.
Fans got a taste of what’s to come with Evancho’s new music video, which was released Tuesday, for her cover of the “Hamilton” tear-jerker “Burn.”
“I basically took a really famous song and I kind of put a modern twist to it because it’s basically older-fashioned,” she said about her take on “Burn“before acknowledging the difficulties of winning over younger listeners with her music.
“It’s really fun and challenging, but it can be frustrating sometimes because when you devote yourself – I try to, at least – to making really quality artwork and music that can reach a younger audience, it’s hard when they’re not listening,” she said. “And it’s hard to figure out how to make them listen. So honestly, I just decided that I’m going to do whatever my heart tells me to do, artistically, and whoever jumps on the bandwagon will jump on the bandwagon.” Evancho, with a discography dominated by Broadway and contemporary classical, still is familiar to mainstream audiences, largely because of “America’s Got Talent,” in which she became the show’s youngest finalist in 2010, finishing in second place at the age of 10.
In 2017, she sang the national anthem at President Donald
Trump’s inauguration, gaining name recognition among new listeners while alienating others who saw her decision to perform as offensive to her LGBTQ fans. Evancho says she regrets the damage caused by her appearance at the inauguration, a decision she says was made collectively by her team and not solely by her.
“I definitely do have some things that I really wish that I could go back and change or fix, especially with my influence with the LGBTQ community,” she said. “Because ever since I sang at the inauguration, they feel like I’m not with them, but I absolutely am and I’m frustrated with the fact that it changed their opinions of me. And I just want them to know that I do advocate for them wholeheartedly and I support them completely.”
“It was (difficult to navigate),” she added. “It wasn’t really my decision, it was a decision made by my team, so I kind of just had to go with it.”
Such instances as the inauguration contributed to Evancho’s decision, once she turned 18, to assume greater creative control over her art and career. She moved to New York and opened up in interviews and Facebook posts about the challenges she faced as a child star, from struggling with an eating disorder to encountering stalkers and dangerous male figures.
Now, she says she feels empowered when fans support her on social media, acknowledging that she does still monitor her accounts and read comments about her, even when they’re hateful.
“It’s great to have the support of everybody, but there are still some of those really annoying people out there who are like, ‘Oh, you have an eating disorder? Poor American princess.’ Stuff like that, and I know I’m still gonna get it, everybody gets hate when you’re in the public eye, and you can’t please everyone. But I just wish it wasn’t necessary to them to have to say it.”
Evancho is planning for a big 2019, full of making music, working on her paintings – one of her favorite non-musical endeavors – and plotting her future entertainment-industry domination.
“I hope that people start to take me more seriously because they’re still adjusting to the idea that I’m now an adult and being an artist and that I have creative ideas that I want to get out to the world,” she said. “So hopefully, for 2019 I’ll be able to get those ideas out. I mean it’s not just music – it’s also makeup and clothing and stuff like that I really want to be able to create my own empire.”