American Idol Season 1 runner-up Justin Guarini is opening up about the difficulties he faced after competing on the show. Guarini said his “world came crumbling down” when his record label dropped him.
Justin Guarini on Life After American Idol
Justin Guarini finished the first season of American Idol in second place behind winner Kelly Clarkson in 2002. In his recently published book, Center Stage Confidence, Guarini wrote about being dropped by his record label, RCA, the following year. He apparently learned the news from a segment on Saturday Night Live.
“I stared at the TV in shock as my entire world came crumbling down around my ears,” Guarini wrote. “Every illusion of fame, fortune, and glory fell away in an instant — only to be replaced by the silence of loss. In that moment, the veil of my arrogance, my assumptions, and my entitlement were lifted away, and I saw my life for what it had become.”
Guarini went on to write that he “lost weight, slept more and more, and became less and less like myself” afterward. However, he told Fox News in a recent interview that the experience was “one of the greatest things that could ever have happened to me.”
“Failure is the greatest teacher, one of the greatest teachers that we can have in any given situation because in that failure, you have one of two paths,” Guarini continued. “You either give up or you keep going.”
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How Did Guarini Change His Mindset?
Justin Guarini told Fox News that he eventually changed his outlook on the unexpected path his career had taken after American Idol when he “realized that there were still people celebrating me.”
“I realized there was still something worth celebrating in my life,” the singer shared. “And it wasn’t the vanity metrics of how many people voted for me or how many followers I would end up having or the amount of money I could make or blah, blah. It was just doing something and going back to something that I really truly loved.”
Guarini went back to recording and performing music, releasing his second album in 2005 and later appearing in several Broadway shows including American Idiot and Wicked.
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“And so, for me, it has been almost 25 years now of some awesome ups and downs, and every single time I go up and down and up and down, it’s just a consistency again of staying in the game,” Justin Guarini explained of his mindset.
