Massapequa Park's Jesse Findling wins golden ticket to Hollywood Week on 'American Idol'

In his audition for "American Idol," previewed by the show on social media, Jesse Findling from Massapequa Park knocked it out of the park — winning a Golden Ticket to Hollywood Week. The segment will be part of the season 24 premiere of the ABC singing competition, Monday at 8 p.m.

Giving an emotion-drenched performance of Benson Boone’s "In the Stars," Findling, who auditioned at age 19 before turning 20 in November, earned a standing ovation from judges Luke Bryan, Lionel Richie and Carrie Underwood.

"You have a beautiful vibrato, a beautiful tone," country-pop star Underwood told him, admiring how "you were in the song emotionally, which just took us right there with you."

Adding to that achievement: Findling is a lifelong stutterer who, like many, have found stuttering generally does not occur while singing. The Stuttering Foundation of America says reasons for this include that vocal cords, lips and the tongue are used differently when singing than when speaking, as well as evidence that the brain functions differently in the two modes.

"Singing emotional songs like that, about somebody who passed away, in that moment I'm not thinking about my stutter," Findling told Newsday. (Boone said in 2023 the lyrics were "written for my grandma.")

“I'm thinking more about the things that I have overcome in life and about all the people who have helped me," he says. "So I think of the emotional meaning outside the main lyrics of the song. And I think also my theater background has helped me a lot."

Findling, a 2023 Massapequa High School graduate, played roles in musical theater there.He has continued in theater at Binghamton University, where he is a junior majoring in biology.

"Musical theater was a way for me to do what I love — sing. It was what was accessible for me at a young age and I kept with it," he says. "But now with ‘American Idol,’ I want to transform and steer away from musical theater into making original music."

It was performing music online that got him an invitation to audition, he says.

"I started posting on social media consistently a year ago," he recalls. "When I had [only] a hundred followers and a video that had 15 likes, a casting guy from ‘American Idol’ reached out and asked if I would be interested in auditioning for the show." He hastens to add this "meant auditioning online, which is a whole process in itself," a kind of pre-audition before getting to sing before the judges, which he eventually did at Belmont University’s McAfee Concert Hall in Nashville, Tennessee.

Taking inspiration in such singers as Ed Sheeran who have overcome stuttering — very little of which Findling exhibited during a Zoom interview — he says that, "I've gotten good at hiding my stutter because I've had a bunch of speech therapists and I use techniques that help me be more fluent, like taking a deep breath or slowing down the pace of how I'm speaking."

And whether he’d have continued on "American Idol" or not after auditioning, "I knew that if I was brave on such a big platform I would inspire so many other people who stutter. I've gotten so many messages from people who have some type of speech impediment," he says. "And my favorite thing is messaging back and kind of being this advocate."