Massapequa Park's Jesse Findling seeks viewers' votes to advance on 'American Idol'

Massapequa Park’s Jesse Findling, who reached the top 20 on the March 9 episode of this season of "American Idol," performs for viewer votes this Monday on the ABC singing competition.
For this foray onto an outdoor beach stage, shot in late January at Disney’s Aulani resort in Ko Olina, Hawaii, the 20-year-old Findling sang The Fray’s 2008 anthemic ballad "Your Found Me." The song is about a crisis of faith and about feeling, per the lyrics, "lost and insecure."
"For this round I wanted to do something a little different," Findling told Newsday on Thursday. "So picking a song was a little bit harder for this round, because the first three songs I sang" for the show — Benson Boone’s "In the Stars," Adele’s "Love in the Dark" and Ed Sheeran’s "Photograph" — "were the kind of songs I think people would expect from me," melodic and melancholy. "Now I wanted to do a song that was more on the pop-rock side where I could move around the stage more. And it was a song I've loved for a long time."

As has his mom, Joy Findling, a reading teacher in the Roosevelt School District, he noted. "My mom loves The Fray," he said, "and she would always play us all of their songs."
For this episode, Findling and the other top-20 singers on this 24th season were mentored by singers Brad Paisley and Keke Palmer. "I’ve never really stood in front of a mic and performed in front of, like, a whole crowd," he tells them in the episode, "but I’m really pushing myself this time to come out of my comfort zone."

"I was a little bit nervous" about meeting them, Findling said. "but as soon as I walked in, they were so sweet. I went in saying I was going to sing a more upbeat song and wanted to move around the stage, so they gave me advice on how to grab the mic stand and how to move around and not have it be in an awkward way — to try to make it natural."
As usual on the show, the eliminations to now have been the sole province of the judges — Luke Bryan, Lionel Richie and Carrie Underwood, with viewer votes now becoming primary. To vote for Findling following his performance and through 6 a.m. Tuesday, viewers 16 and older can text 7 to 21523; go to the website AmericanIdol.com/Vote; or comment on the pinned official voting post for the night on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. One can vote 10 times per contestant per method.
"The support so far has been awesome and having Long Island behind me has been great," Findling said. "It'll actually get me through now" to the live rounds, which begin on March 30.
Findling’s parents — Joy Findling and dad Scott Findling, a senior vice president of the multinational media conglomerate Viacom who had shared a 2003 New York Emmy Award for Live Sports Coverage while previously at MSG Network — appear on-screen in the concert audience, along with Jesse’s younger brother Jack and older sister, Samantha, a first-year nurse. Jesse, a 2023 Massapequa High School graduate, is currently on a spring-semester break from upstate Binghamton University, where he is a junior majoring in biology.