Mamaroneck teen on a ‘wild ride’
Carly Rose Sonenclar singing Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.”
Got a few minutes with Carly Rose Sonenclar, the Rye Neck eighth-grader who wowed “The X Factor” judges last week.
She’ll be back at Rye Neck tomorrow, a girl with a video that has been viewed 2.1 million times.
“Before this, the highest a video I was in ever got was 20,000 views, for an ‘Electric Company’ video, so that had a lot of ‘Electric Company’ followers, it wasn’t just for me. And now the ‘X Factor’ video has more than two million and my other videos have gone up.”
Her profile on Twitter is higher, too, although people posing as her have co-opted some of that.
“Before it aired, I had 96 followers and now I have more than 4,000,” she said. “But there are people impersonating me on Twitter and they have 80,000 followers and I have 4,000. My Twitter account, the official one, is CarlyRoseMusic.”
She’s back from L.A., where she watched last week’s airing of her jaw-dropping Providence audition.
(She shot it in June and sat on the secret till now. Why was she in L.A.? That’s another secret we’ll have to tune in to learn.)
Carly is enjoying the “wild ride,” even on a day crammed with interviews that this morning included “Access Hollywood Live.”
The Broadway veteran (“Les Miz” at age 7; “Wonderland” at 11) says “X Factor” editors made her seem more nervous than she really was.
“I was nervous, but they made it look like I was a nervous wreck,” she says with a laugh. “Hopefully, people understand that that wasn’t completely true.”
She says the situation was pressure packed, though, since she was standing in the wings, able to see the judges, while the contestant before her auditioned. “You’re actually on the stage, so I thought it would make me nervous. But I was ready.”
Once she started to sing, Carly says, she was in “my own little world.”
After the judges voted and moved her on to the next round, Carly says she floated off the stage, which seemed somehow familiar.
“I really didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “It was a great weird feeling. I’ve watched the show and I’ve seen it happen to people. They go on, they get good feedback or bad feedback, their parents are there watching the screen and they come off and they hug. I’ve seen it done. But to have it be me doing it is still kind of a weird thing.”
“But walking off, I felt like I did everything I came to do and more. And seeing my parents crying and going crazy was also fun.”
