Elise Testone: Bottom Three doesn't define me

Elise Testone: Bottom Three doesn't define me

Even though Elise Testone spent six of the last eight weeks in the Bottom Three, she always felt she had farther to go on American Idol. "I really did, even though I was in the Bottom Three every time," the 28-year-old vocal coach from South Carolina said by phone Friday morning. "I had faith that that wasn't it for me. But it was.

"But it isn't, really. That's not defining me. There's so much more to come. It's just a stepping stone."

Elise wound up in the Bottom Three every week of the finals except two -- the weeks she sang Billy Joel's Vienna and Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love. She spent so much time there that record executive Jimmy Iovine called it her "vacatio n home." ("It's always nice to get a little vacation time," she quips.)

On the one hand, repeatedly finding herself in danger of being eliminated from the competition had to be agonizing. On the other hand, she managed to stay in the competition for weeks while contestants like Colton Dixon and DeAndre Brackensick fell quickly from voters' graces. "It made me stronger," she says. "It made me feel like a fighter."

Elise says Iovine was always harsher in the video than he was face to face. However, she adds, "There's always something you can walk away with from what he says."

Elise's best mentoring experience with Stevie Nicks. "She reminded me that once you own the song and make it yours, then it becomes your song. That defines an artist."

Once she made the finals, Elise found herself with a group of singers most of whom were eight to 12 years younger than her. In some ways, she thinks the age difference helped her.

"But so me people look at it as not good, because they feel like a lot of the voters are the teenyboppers, and maybe they would want to vote for someone closer in age to them," she says. "But in my fanbase on Twitter, a large amount of people were younger. The thing about me is, I might be older, but I have that young spirit, so I feel like I can connect with any age.

"I'm fortunate to be older, because of the knowledge I've acquired to give me the confidence to speak my mind and work hard to achieve my goals and use my lessons to help the others.

Elise, who roomed with Erika Van Pelt until she was eliminated, says the younger singers in the competition often turned to her for advice. "I could always point out if they needed something," she says. "It's good to have someone who's not in charge of you but is in your same boat and might know a little bit more."

But Elise didn't have any trouble seeking suggestions from the other singers, particularly Phillip Phillips ("and, no, we're not dating," she says quickly, just in case you were wondering).

"It was a nice balance of personalities, and they actually taught me a lot, too," she says. "I would go to any one of any age at any time. They are all very mature for their age. I also liked the fact that are so much younger, because they have a fresh and different viewpoint on things. I think it's more of a benefit, sometimes, than being older."

Elise also got some help from home in her final week on Idol, bringing Wallace Mullinax, her guitarist from South Carolina, to play Jimi Hendrix's Bold as Love with her.

"I was texting him, asking what key we played Bold as Love in. He said, 'Oh, I don't remember, I guess I'll just come play it for you.' I said, 'Yeah, I should ask for you to come.' So I asked, they said yes, and he came."

Looking ahead, Elise says: "I can not wait to keep doing those live performances of full songs -- really div e into the songs and let loose, go back to what I was doing before. You know -- singing whole songs.

"Also recording an album. I'm going to focus on putting that together. I've yet to release one. I've never released one before, and I've been waiting. Now I've got all these resources."

She's glad she stayed on the show long enough to find her way back from some rough weeks where she felt like she got away from her strengths and tried to please other people instead.

"What I learned was to not get in my head," she says. "What I was doing at the end is what I'd been doing my whole life. I think I stopped doing that at some point in the middle of the contest. I started thinking about what everybody wanted. I lost sight of that natural thing that I had and what I've learned throughout my whole life. I finally got that back, and now I'm going to go and share it with the world."