Last night, the black-haired bad girl with a heart of gold, the woman who left the love of her life back in small-town Iowa to pursue her Nashville dream, the woman who was in the bottom two so many times she probably thought she never had a chance of winning...well, she didn't win, but she did make it all the way to third place on Nashville Star.
Shawn may not have been the frontrunner on this show, but she is a major undiscovered talent, so I don't think this is the last we've heard from her. Because in a tour bus interview, caught on camera just an hour or so before the finale taping, Nashville Star judge and Shawn mentor Jeffrey Steele indicated that he'd still be supporting his protégé's career long after the NStar cameras stop rolling.
And Jeffrey wasn't shy about taking some credit for her success, after Shawn "fired" her original mentor John Rich:
And just moments after the finale taping, Shawn met with me and some other enquiring-minded press types to discuss her reaction to the results and her plans for the future. And she was more awesome that I could have imagined. Dare I say I developed a little girl-crush?
Here's Shawn's three-part interview. For someone who supposedly came across as "sad" all the time (at least according to Jewel), Shawn sure seemed pretty cheerful to me:
Shawn was so thoroughly charming, so completely cool, that I was proud that I'd publicly named this supposed underdog as my personal pick for Nashville Star's winner. So proud, in fact, that I was practically marching up to the show's producers and demanding a vote recount!
Well, I was at the finale rehearsal earlier yesterday afternoon, when all three finalists practiced singing the victory song "What If It All Goes Right"--so at least I got to see what it would've been like if Shawn had won, in some alternate/parallel NStar universe. Here's a pic of her pretend-winning and her fellow finalists pretend-congratulating her:
Now all I want to know is, where can I buy one of those T-shirts Shawn was talking about in part 2 of her interview above?:
