A year ago, Anoop Desai was a graduate student at the same school where he had gone to college, in the same town where he had graduated high school.
It's a school and a place he loves.
But the American Idol semi-finalist from Chapel Hill is not ready to come home yet.
Desai, 22, is traveling the country this summer, singing his way from Portland, Ore., to Manchester, N.H.,
as part of the American Idols Live! Tour with the other top 10 contestants from the show's eighth season, which wrapped up earlier this year.
Desai placed sixth.
He tried out for the show last summer, months after he graduated from UNC Chapel Hill and as he was entering a graduate program there in folklore.
No regrets, though. "I'm doing something I probably wouldn't have done in my wildest dreams," Desai said in a recent phone interview hours before his second show of the tour, in Tacoma, Wash. "But I am looking forward to making this my career. It's what I'm best at. It's what I'm happiest doing.
"I'm really using the tours … as sort of a mini-audition process for that. There's nothing definite yet, but I'm hoping it leads to something down the road."
The tour will bring Desai back to North Carolina this weekend -- he'll be in Charlotte at the Time Warner Cable Arena on Saturday and closer to our neck of the woods at the Greensboro Coliseum on Sunday night. He is especially looking forward to the Greensboro show, he said, when many of his friends will be there. "Greensboro and Charlotte will be incredible."
Desai will be joined by a lineup of last season's American Idol crooners -- winner Kris Allen, Adam Lambert, Allison Iraheta, Megan Joy and more.
Being on tour is actually less hectic than the show, Desai says, because his hours off air aren't spent learning new tunes.
Desai will sing three songs: Willie Nelson's "Always On My Mind," "My Prerogative" by Bobby Brown, and "Mad" by Ne-Yo, his favorite male singer.
Back in grad school, people didn't know he could sing, Desai said.
Oh, but he can. And he didn't just practice in the shower (though he did sing along with the radio). As a kid, Desai was in the Raleigh Boys' Choir, and in chorus and in an a cappella group at East Chapel Hill High School after his family moved from Cary to Chapel Hill.
In college, he was a member of the Clef Hangers, an established men's a cappella group.
It was his friendship with UNC Chapel Hill study-body president Eve Carson that spurred Desai to audition for American Idol, though. Carson was murdered on March 5, 2008.
Desai sang "My Prerogative" on American Idol on the one-year anniversary of Carson's death, and mentioned her from the show's stage. And recently, he exchanged e-mails with Carson's parents. "I didn't want to make it a big deal. It was sort of a personal journey for me. It was laying heavy on my mind on that day, and I wished I could be back in Chapel Hill that day.
"I was thinking about auditioning and when she passed, I sort of saw it as a tribute to her to go and do this. I think of her certainly when I'm on the show."
He met Carson after a Clef Hangers performance his freshman year. They continued to see one another at school functions because of Carson's involvement with student government. "That alone was encouraging. Whenever I'd see her, she wanted the best for me."
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement