Trent Harmon was crowned American Idol's fifteenth-season champion and has been hitting the ground running.

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American Idol host Ryan Seacrest declared Trent, a 25-year-old waiter from Amory, MS, the farewell season's winner during last week's live two-hour finale broadcast on Fox.

Trent received more home viewer votes following the final performance show than runner-up La'Porsha Renae, a 22-year-old call representative from McComb, MS.

During a recent conference call with reporters, Trent talked about his Idol experience and victory. Below is what he had to say. Check back with Reality TV World soon for more.

This season's finale was different because so many Idol winners and contestants came back to perform when usually the Top 2 get to sing duets with famous singers. If you had your pick of someone to perform with, who would it be?

Trent Harmon: Elton John!

What do you see your first album looking like? What kind of music?

Trent Harmon: I see blue-eyes soul, you know? I talked it over with Mr. [Scott Borchetta] and he said, "Justin Timberlake is thinking about making a country album, so define 'country' in 2016 and I think it could be whatever you want it to be."

So, we're going to try to make an album the country supporters would pick up. Country supporters, they go to shows, they go to festivals, they buy CDs, they download stuff. If you can make it in country, you can have a career.

What have the past 24 hours been like for you? Have you gotten any sleep?

Trent Harmon: Well, I've got sleep scheduled for next Friday. But I really feel like it hasn't really sunk in yet. It hasn't really sunk in because this morning when I hopped out of bed, I jumped in the shower and started doing my warmups. I started practicing my song and I realized that today, I don't have to do that anymore.

And I'm kind of realizing that I can decompress a little bit at a time, and I don't know how long it will take. It might take a week or a month before I really calm down out of, I hate to say PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder] but I'm still kind of in that mode, where I feel like at any moment, I could get cut. But I can't get cut anymore. (Laughs)

Out of all the American Idol alumni who gathered for the finale, whom did you get to hang out with after the show ended?

Trent Harmon: You name it! You name it. If they've been on the show, I got to hang out with them. Some bucket list people I got to hang out with, I mean, were Jordin Sparks again, I got to talk to David Archuleta for awhile, David Cook. I got to have a pretty long conversation with James Durbin. You name it, I got to talk to them last night. It was great.

You have some Smokey Robinson or Little Anthony influences in your falsetto. How old were you when you found out you had that talent? And is your style of singing influenced by any classic singers?

Trent Harmon: That's a good question. Nobody's asked me a question like that. I just really learned that I could do things with my voice that I didn't know I could do probably, you know, middle to the last few years of my college experience. So, just in the last two to four years, you know?

I think I always heard the notes in my head, while I'd be listening to Smokey Robinson or The Temptations. My grandmother played a lot of Temptations and a lot of Michael Jackson and The Jackson 5 back in the day when I'd be at her house and she'd be cooking. And I would hear those notes in my head that I would want to sing, but I never tried to sing them. And one day, they just jumped out of my mouth.

I read that "Amazing Grace" was the first song you sang to your mom and the song you sang at your friend's funeral. What does that song mean to you and what do you recall of those two moments in your life?

Trent Harmon: I keep "Amazing Grace" in my back pocket. No matter where I go, whether it's a Christian event I'm at or if it's not, you know, even if it's a secular event. I don't know. Maybe it's just because I know the words to it and the words mean something to just about anybody, whether you have any religious beliefs or not. That song means something.

There's a reason it's called "a classic..." I've just sang it at so many different things and it means so much to me. That one is special to me and was the first one when my mom said, "Hey, Trent, sing this part right here." And I sang it.

And then she said, "Can you switch over and sing this part right here?" And that's when she realized I could sing harmony. And then when I was four or five-years-old, she realized something that I didn't even realize at that early of an age.

Throughout your journey on American Idol, was there anything you were surprised to learn about yourself?

Trent Harmon: I have always thought to myself that if I could ever get to the point, you know, there are so many intangibles that are encompassed within this reality singing competition. It's not so much singing.

There's so much that goes into it. I would say singing is less than 10% of it. But I knew that I could hang in the singing department, but I didn't know that I could do interviews. You know, nobody has coached us on how to talk to people in a public setting.

And so, sometimes, like right now, I'm talking with you having a conversation and I've never done this before in my life. That has really surprised me and surprised my parents too. They say, "Trent, you've talked to more people in interviews than you've talked to us in your whole 25 years of life. Who taught you how to do that?"

What was the most surreal moment for you in this competition?

Trent Harmon: I think whenever I turned around and I saw my mom and dad and my sister and my puppy dog walk out onto the stage two weeks ago.

It was strange because it was like, you know, I'm out here and I know that I'm out here doing this, but when they walked out onstage, I was like, "Wow, we look good as a collective unit, as a family." Like, "We look like we're doing stuff as the Harmon collective unit." I felt like I was doing something for my family, so that was pretty surreal.

To read what Trent Harmon told Reality TV World, click here. Be sure to check back with us soon for more from his post-Idol interview.


About The Author: Elizabeth Kwiatkowski

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