Last season on American Idol, Benson Boone got a Golden Ticket to Hollywood, but then dropped out in the middle of the competition. Now he’s signed to a record label owned by Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons and has a hit with “Ghost Town” — which is about the best outcome he could’ve hoped for.
Boone tells ABC Audio he didn’t decide to quit Idol until “far after the first round.” He notes, “When it started, I was just kind of like excited to be there and just having a good time, enjoying what I was doing. But as I went on…realizing that winning could be a possibility, that’s when it kicked in that maybe I don’t fully know why I’m there.”
It was after he dropped out that Dan Reynolds contacted him. Benson, who says he’d been “listening to Imagine Dragons’ music my whole life,” tells ABC Audio, “He reached out to me just over Instagram and said he loves my vibe and my voice, and he would love to work with me.”
“I had never written any of my own music, so I flew out to Vegas for like three days to work with him,” Benson continues. “At the end of that, he said he really liked working with me and he really liked my personality, and so I literally packed up and moved to Vegas the next day. It was crazy! But yeah, he, like, has been my mentor through all of this.”
Seems as though Dan was a pretty good mentor: Benson’s hit “Ghost Town” is now on the radio airplay charts right alongside Imagine Dragons’ latest hit, “Enemy,” from the soundtrack of the animated series Arcane.
On Friday, Benson released the follow-up song to “Ghost Town,” “Room for 2.” He says the song is “basically just a journal entry about this girl…who makes me feel like I’d do anything for her.”
Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
