AMERICAN IDOL’s Emmy Russell ‘Felt Peaceful’ Before Making Top 14

Published: April 24, 2024

AMERICAN IDOL’s Emmy Russell ‘Felt Peaceful’ Before Making Top 14

By Movieguide® Contributor

AMERICAN IDOL competitor and country star Loretta Lynn’s granddaughter, Emmy Russell, made it into the top 14 contestants on April 16 after she delivered an authentic original song.

“I was back there and I was just thinking, ‘So many good people have gone home,’” she said about the moment before she was told she made the top 14, “and so I was like, ‘Well, if that person went home, and I surely might go home.’”

“So I was preparing for the no, but I knew that I’d walk away with a song that I believed in and felt like me, so I was really peaceful,” the 25-year-old told PEOPLE. “That’s not normally how I feel, but I felt peaceful.”

Russell sang “Skinny,” her original audition song, barefoot on the stage.

“Some of the cast was saying it feels like we should strip me back and just be Emmy,” she said.

“I think that was the best thing I could have possibly done,” she continued. “I was really uncomfortable in something that I wore the other night, my little white boots, and so I was like, ‘Guys, I have to strip it back. I don’t feel like myself.’ And I feel like I sang better.”

Russell struggled with an eating disorder throughout her teen years. She wrote “Skinny” after she fell ill while on a mission trip and relapsed. She went into recovery and wrote the song with the Nashville songwriting collective Song House, per American Songwriter.

Movieguide® recently reported on the young singer’s passion for songwriting:

“I’m a songwriter,” Russell, who is currently competing on AMERICAN IDOL, explained. “It’s in my blood. When I was 9, I wrote my first real song.”

She added, “Whenever you share a song, it’s very vulnerable. Anything I feel, I write. It just starts coming out of me. I go to my iPhone and my piano—it is my best friend whenever it comes to music. I feel a melody, I go to my iPhone, record it. A lyric, go to it, record it.”

She told PEOPLE earlier this month that her time on AMERICAN IDOL helped her realize that singing and songwriting are what she wants to do forever.

She said, “I just want to keep on creating truthful art. I just want to keep on writing, and whether that’s singing the song or singing it and writing for other people, I want to do this. This American Idol experience has solidified, ‘Oh no, I want to do this for the rest of my life.”