John Park has been readjusting to life in Evanston for a month. Now what?
Photo: Licensed under CC from Tunachilli.
A week after John Park left the American Idol stage to come home to Evanston, he’s busy autographing 50 napkins for a throng of high school students passing through Norris University Center. “It’s flattering and stupid, is what I think,” he says matter-of-factly, flashing his boyish, wide-mouthed grin. “Like, I’m still like a college kid at this school, you know?”
One month later, everyone still knows. No one can blame a few high school girls for wanting a piece of him. After all, who could forget the Weinberg junior’s sultry primetime debut on the ninth season of Idol with his rendition of Donny Hathaway’s “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know”? Or a consequently hot-for-student Shania Twain complimenting Park’s “beautiful bottom end” while violently thrashing Randy Jackson with her shirt strings? The Korean-American Park, 21, of Northbrook, Ill., was the sweetest token-Asian invasion Idol had seen since season three’s William Hung, whose 30-second cover of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” belongs in its own category of infamous moments in reality-TV history.
Seeing Park sitting at a table in the basement of Norris, you would never guess he had just spent the past few months of his life living on national television. “That’s what I breathed,” he says. “For me it was a life changing experience, but when I see it on screen it’s still a TV show. You just don’t know until you get a different perspective.”
His Facebook page, which boasts almost 11,000 fans to date, regularly saw comments from complete strangers saying “Go John! youre great!!!!! and ur the only azn this yr so u gotta represent!!!”
In a way, he’s right. Idol changed the trajectory of Park’s career, his relationship with his parents, and his status as an extraordinary person at an ordinary school. Since he got back to Evanston the night after his departure from the show, Park has felt the ogling stares of strangers and fellow students alike. It’s a strange kind of stardom, he says, and one that he’s not sure he finds comfortable. “It’s very nice, but it’s dumb. It’s just way too much,” he says of his newfound mini-celebrity status. “I feel a little materialized. People want it because they just want the connection. They don’t really like me, it’s just because I was on TV. And for that, they want something from me.”
But in some ways, Park isn’t any different from the person he was when he left for Hollywood in the fall. He’s sitting here promoting a Purple Haze concert, surrounded by the friends he left and has now returned to, and it’s all very normal. “The only thing that has changed is myself as a performer,” he says. “And it’s weird that I’m getting treated differently and getting recognized for that. I feel a little pity for celebrities.”
Park’s rise to Hollywood quasifame, under the blue and purple lights of the glittery Idol stage, is a far cry from the auditoriums and res-college playhouses of his a cappella days. At Glenbrook North High School, Park sang in various a cappella groups and choirs, in addition to starring in school productions of Les Misérables and Footloose before coming to NU and joining campus a cappella group Purple Haze, where he is currently the music director. After Park made it into the top 24 contestants in mid-February, his Facebook page and Twitter account gained a rapidly growing fan base. His Facebook page, which boasts almost 11,000 fans to date, regularly saw comments from complete strangers saying “Go John! youre great!!!!! and ur the only azn this yr so u gotta represent!!!”
But Park never expected to find himself in Hollywood representing anyone, least of all himself. When Idol hosted auditions in Chicago last August, he went on a whim, after two friends suggested he try out. To Park, the endless stream of contestants from previous seasons had always been pawns in a predetermined, commercialized glamour game. “I thought it was more about the TV than the talent and the contestants themselves,” he says. “I watched the first season in middle school and I really loved it, but from then on I just hated it because it was season after season after season. And it was just these people.” Weinberg junior Brett Parker, a friend of Park’s, remembers it differently: “A lot of people told him, ‘Man, you should really try out,’ but he never really wanted to because he didn’t think he was good enough.”
The entire panel of judges came up to him and said if he had only shown that same soul in his last few performances, he wouldn’t have been saying goodbye.
By February, the notes rang clear: Park was good enough, at least to make it into the show’s top 24. But that’s when the hot Hollywood lights and Simon Cowell’s piercing gaze began to weigh down on Park’s honeyed tones and signature charm. During his first week in the top 24, Park performed Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” a song that he later said he chose specifically because it was close to his heart. But his heart was missing that night, and he knew it. “I tried not to think about the other side of the camera and the people who are watching, but still, it was distracting to have the judges there knowing that they were going to criticize me,” he says. “It was hard to focus, and that’s why the judges were saying there was no connection to the song. So that was bad.”
Which is why when Park left the Idol stage for good last Thursday—amid roaring fans, crying friends, and his proud parents watching him from an offstage balcony—he wasn’t surprised. “I was kind of expecting it,” he says. “I didn’t really figure myself out as an artist. I definitely had a strong enough voice to be on for longer, but my performances were weak and I didn’t feel confident.”
In a moment of bittersweet irony, Park’s finest minutes onstage came through in his final performance, when he sang John Mayer’s “Gravity” for the second and last time, bidding America a farewell steeped in the emotion he had been trying to harness for weeks. “That was when I was like, Fuck it, and all the pressure, all the tension, all the nerves just released,’” he says. “What a stage. What a moment. The words are perfect too: ‘Gravity is working against me/Keep me where the light is.’ I just wanted to be here.” When the show went to commercial break after his final number, Park says the entire panel of judges came up to him and said if he had only shown that same soul in his last few performances, he wouldn’t have been standing before them, saying goodbye.
The emotional void in Park’s performances comes as a surprising criticism for the crooner, especially one who has regularly performed for large audiences since he was a freshman in top high school choirs. “He does not sing without emotion. He doesn’t,” says Michael David Hall, Park’s best friend, who sang with him for four years at Glenbrook North. “He’s got a lot of soul, and I think they went too far with that statement.” Hall, who does lead vocals for a pop-rock band with 15,000 Facebook fans called South Jordan, recalls a time when Park came home with him one Thanksgiving break and sat down at his mother’s piano to sing “Jealous Guy” by Gavin DeGraw. “My sisters just got really emotional when he sang that song,” he says. “We all got the chills, like we were in the presence of something extremely special.”
In high school, Park and Hall would sing together every afternoon, beginning in their freshman year when they met in the back of a car during initiation night for Glenbrook North’s all-male a cappella group, Ow! Hall remembers singing constantly, whether while driving around harmonizing to the radio on the way to the bowling alley or in rehearsals. Learning to perform dynamically for large audiences from an early age initially went to the pair’s heads. “At least with me and I think it’s the same way with John, you can get a pretty cocky attitude toward things,” Hall says. “You think that since you’re on stage at such a young age you’re really important.”
But Park’s back-to-back sleepy-ballad performances in Hollywood garnered the same comment across the judges’ panel that eventually sent him home: Make us believe in what you’re singing. America wants more than just a good voice. But Idol has never been a singing competition, and Park has never been one to cater to mainstream pressures. “They need someone who’s commercial, right? But people can’t try to be that,” he says. “You have to be yourself. If you’re being fake or trying to look a different way or even trying to sing in a way that’s more popular, people aren’t going to buy that.”
It’s an odd situation for Park, to have been sent home for lacking the characteristic charm and energy his friends and teachers say they’re used to seeing in his performances. “John has a lot of warmth and sincerity,” says Judy Moe, Glenbrook North’s formal choral director, who wrote a recommendation letter for Park’s application to NU. “That comes through, but when the judges talk, they’re missing the sort of star quality, you know?” Park’s bluesy crooner image was also a difficult sell, creating a weak spot in his mass appeal. “Some people have more style than John, that sort of rocky-raspy, more Daughtry type that has been on the show before,” she says. “Some of the rockier guys who have more sandpapery voices are more stylistic.”
If there was a dearth of enthusiasm about Park’s style nationwide, it didn’t affect his NU fanbase. “Last week we went out to a bar night and we ended up getting everyone to call in,” Parker says. “I called in 90 times I think, another guy called in 300 times.”
And even though Park has gracefully exited Idol and returned to his life in Evanston, he hasn’t left the public eye for good. Park, who is still represented by Fox, has a standing contract with the show, which includes access to the production hotshots who manage successful former Idols, such as Kelly Clarkson and Jordin Sparks. For now, Park is continuing to adjust to the clash between living in the public eye and trying to revert to his normal college life, though it hasn’t been an easy transition. “I feel like I’m at this school now, and with every person I meet from now on, I’m going to be labeled,” he says, with a long pause. “I kind of wish that I didn’t have the exposure. It’s great if I become an artist and a musician, but as a student, it sucks.”
But famehounds remain a small sacrifice for what he has reaped from the Idol experience, particularly in what he was able to give back to his parents, after years of second guesses and discourse between them on whether music was the right path for him. “I think it was the greatest gift I could give them,” he says. “To acknowledge them on national television, thank them, give them two weeks of vacation in Hollywood, and ultimately to just make them proud.”
That’s not to say he would take back one sonorous second of the past few months. “This was the most incredible thing that’s happened in my life,” Park says, with a lingering hint of disbelief in his voice. “And it’s silly because it’s a TV show, but I have learned so much that I couldn’t learn anywhere else. I got to work with Michael Jackson’s coach and the people who have produced Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston.” If anything, Park says, being on Idol has been confirmation that he will never consider life without music. “I am one lucky bastard to have gone through this. I really am. Because there are way more talented people out there. And the fact that I got this chance was a miracle.”
