Sometimes the third time really is the charm.

John Foster didn’t just walk into American Idol and blow the judges away. He earned his spot the hard way. Not once, but twice, he auditioned and didn’t make it past the gate. First on Zoom during the C*VID days, then in person. Both times, he left without a golden ticket, but with something better: fire in his gut. Because while some folks would pack it in after two rejections, Foster turned failure into fuel. And when producers finally called him back in 2024, he didn’t just show up. He arrived.

New details from his mother, Amanda Benoit, paint a deeper picture of the road that got him there. Back home in tiny Addis, Louisiana, Foster was already catching buzz. He started selling out local shows. He found his voice and began writing songs that came from somewhere real. But what changed everything was tragedy.

In one of the most talked-about moments of Season 23, Foster performed his original song “Tell That Angel I Love Her,” written for his late best friend Maggie Dunn, who was killed in a car crash on New Year’s Eve 2022. The emotion in his voice and the raw honesty in his lyrics stopped everyone cold.

Amanda said watching him perform that song on national television was both heartbreaking and beautiful. “He carried Maggie with him. Every word of that song, she was there.”

It turns out Maggie left John a note before she died, telling him not to give up on his dream. “Never give up on your singing dreams. Your voice is too good to go unheard,” she wrote. That note became his mission.