It’s been a few days now since Maddie Poppe was named the winner of American Idol 2018. She’s been on the talk show circuit tour, along with runner up and boyfriend Caleb Lee Hutchinson, so we’ve gotten a lot of interesting tidbits from her interviews.
On Live with Kelly and Ryan, Maddie revealed that she actually saw her name listed as the winner on Ryan Seacrest’s results card even before he announced it.
“Ryan, you’re really bad at hiding the card,” Maddie told Ryan “Every week you have it and I always know I can see it but I never look … [But this time] I couldn’t help it. I looked over at Caleb and I couldn’t help it … I saw it said ‘Maddie Poppe’.”
Ryan was shocked that she could see the card, but it’s not the first time that has happened. Clay Aiken saw the card all the way back in Season 2.
Maddie has also talked about her relationship with Caleb. That has been a bigger topic than her win, actually, it seems.
“We kind of hid (our relationship) because we didn’t want people to think we weren’t concentrated on the show and we didn’t want it to affect the voting,” Maddie told the Des Moines Register. “I guess once the finale hit, all of that stuff didn’t really matter anymore.”
But why did they decide to come out with it?
“That morning, a producer had actually come up to us and said that Ryan found out about our relationship and that if we were the final two, were we OK with that coming out.” she said.”We both were like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine.'”
The other big news since her win is that her single “Going Going Gone” shot all the way to No. 3 on the iTunes charts and it still sits there! That’s several days of charting, so that’s pretty incredible for an American Idol winner’s coronation song.
And speaking of her music, what does she have planned for her first album post Idol?
“I want to stick with doing the vein I stuck with on the show just because I didn’t realize how far that would take me in the competition,” she told the Register. “I really want to keep being true to what I want to do and I don’t want to get caught up in the other things that sometimes tend to come from being in the music industry. I just need to stand up for myself and just be true to myself and not get caught up in the money aspect of it all. I want to make sure I do it right.”