Carrie Underwood reveals the one thing she’d change about her ‘American Idol’ experience

Carrie Underwood on ABC’s ‘American Idol’ (Disney/Eric McCandless)

Carrie Underwood is one of the biggest stars to emerge from American Idol, but even though her time on the show obviously worked out the best it possibly could have for her, she still has one regret.

Asked by Billboard what she would change if she could go back in time and change one thing about her time on the show, for which she now serves as a judge, Carrie says, “I’m very angry with myself because when I was on the show, I wasn’t taking any pictures. I’m thinking, ‘Why? Why didn’t you do that? Why didn’t you save these things?’”

Carrie goes on to say, “We had a girl come in that had a pair of jeans that I wore on the show, and she told me, ‘My grandpa bought these at a charity auction.’ … [A]nd I asked, ‘Can I buy them back from you?'”

“Why did I let them go?” she wonders. “Why didn’t I keep more things and just document things a little better?”

As for fellow judge Luke Bryan, he says the one thing he’d change is that he “would have cherished more moments with Willie Spence.” Willie, the season 19 runner-up, died in a car crash in October 2022. He was 23.

“That’s a biggie to me – losing him and knowing how much he touched me in that room, in that space, watching him perform week in and week out. It was truly breathtaking,” Luke says.

“He was from Douglas, Georgia, which is an hour from my hometown. That loss really affected me. From time to time, I’ll see a clip of him singing and it just breaks my heart for him and his family, and I just can only imagine what his career might have been.”