Regarding his own experience on the show, Johns approached each week differently - with one constant: he wanted to stay true to himself.

"I just said to myself, 'Look, I'm not going to worry about what Randy, Simon, or Paula says. Just sing from the heart and be true to yourself.' That's how I picked my songs each week."

I wondered if he had been influenced by anything he had read on the internet about himself - good or bad - during the competition.

"No. I mean, when you first get into the top 24, you read for the first couple of weeks. You might read some good stuff, then you might read something really terrible - really mean - and you think 'Oh no.' Then I said, 'Hey, don't believe the good or the bad.' I stopped reading them at all. And I definitely stayed true to that. But now fan sites have been set up, and everyone has been so sweet after the show. There's one called Michael Johns Online. Sometimes I look at her site. I was like, 'No wonder I'm so tired - look at all the stuff I've been doing since I've been off the show.' The last 8 weeks have been pretty full-on."

I asked for his thoughts on my personal favorite, his soulful rendition of Dolly Parton's "It's All Wrong But It's All Right." He told me it was his favorite performance as well.

And was the arrangement his?

"Yeah, it was all me. I just was going through the Dolly Parton songs we'd been given for that week. And I had been a big fan of Dolly my whole life. My mum was a big fan and I grew up listening to her CDs. I knew that song very well, it was a favorite of my mum's. Twenty years later, after hearing it the first time, I heard it with a rock/soul vibe. Man, I could really change a country song into a soul song. It kinda worked out. I worked it out on the guitar, showed the band how I wanted to play it, and we got away with it."

On the show Johns had never played the guitar during a performance, so it took me by surprise that he was an instrumentalist. This being the first season American Idol allowed the contestants to play instruments, I was curious if he had planned to play guitar on the show.