Season 18 of American Idol premieres tonight, Feb 16, on ABC. The two-hour episode will feature auditions from all over the country! Here’s who you can expect to see performing tonight, and some highlights to keep an eye out for.
Judges Katy Perry, Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie are all returning to Idol for a third season! Joining them in an in-house mentor, named Bobby Bones, who was heavily featured in 2019’s season of the show. Ryan Seacrest will also be on the season, and has been on all of the previous seasons as well; all 17. That’s pretty impressive.
Here is who will be performing on American Idol Season 18, Episode 1.
We’ll be seeing Nick Merico return to the show! That’s pretty exciting, considering he had to quit American Idol last season, season 18, during Hollywood Week. The singer-songwriter is back tonight to try for another chance at the title!
During Season 17, Merico won the judges over with his rendition of “Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse, causing the judges to “swoon”. Merico had preciously appeared on 4 seasons of Nickelodeon’s Every Witch Way, as character Daniel Miller.
Hopefully, he will make it through the season!
Hunter Gibson is another contestant who will come on tonight’s episode, and is a self-proclaimed rock-alt style writer, as well as a singer. He previously auditioned for The Voice, but did not receive a callback.
He actually auditioned in July 2019 for The Voice.
“I did a huge thing last weekend! I auditioned for the voice with my cousin Robyn. We grew up singing, dancing and making music together so it was cool to have a full circle moment getting to audition for one of the shows we watched growing up. […] I’m auditioning for American Idol next month so if you have any song suggestions please leave them in the comments below.”
He has two YouTube channels! His first channel has videos from eight years ago, meeting YouTubers and more. There was no content uploaded between 2015 and 2018, however he picked the channel up again since, and has uploaded popular covers of songs.
The second channel is called THECOMEBACK, and has three uploads, titled: “Circles”, “Over and Over”, and the third is titled: “thecomeback–& SCREENS {lyric video}”.
Samantha “Just Sam” Diaz had an emotional segment in Season 18, premiere of Idol. She’s from Harlem, New York, and while she’s had a tough life she keeps a cheery disposition! She breaks down in her audition, but the judges helped her through it.
Then there’s Saveria, a performer from Ontario, Canada. She’s 22 years old, a songwriter, a singer, and a producer. She has a smoother R&B vibe about her. She is not a stranger to reality singing competitions, having auditioned once before for former American Idol mentor, Scott Borchetta, on a Canadian TV show called The Launch.
There are many more contestants that we don’t even touch on, and the great thing is, you’ll see a lot of them do really awesome stuff! Hopefully we’ll see some Golden Buzzers during this season, and our favorites won’t be voted off before their times…
Some other contestants are: Alisa Ermolaev, Louis Knight, Doug Kiker, Meghan Fitton, Camry Leigh Smith, Francisco Martin, and many, many more. They’ve all got their own talents and preferences, so hopefully this lengthy episode will be good!
