Colon, a 34-year-old singer with two young daughters who lives in West Hartford, Conn., bested three other finalists — Dia Frampton, Beverly McClellan and Vicci Martinez — to win $100,000 and a Universal Republic recording contract.
It was no surprise to his celebrity "coach," Maroon 5's Adam Levine, who guessed the outcome at the first auditions: "The second I heard him sing I thought he was going to win the whole thing," Levine says. Though he worried at Wednesday's finale about an upset, "Fortunately, I was right. He's so powerful at so many different levels of his range, he's truly capable of singing anything."
But such confidence from Levine and fans "didn't affect me at all," Colon says.
"I was coming from a very guarded place, being that I've been in the music business for a while now, and I've been pretty beaten up and had a lot of doors closed in my face," he says. "I looked at every performance the same, which was I had to perform and I had to have a great song. And even if I did that, that didn't guarantee me a spot to continue to the next week."
Colon, the former lead singer of the Derek Trucks Band, had a two-record deal with Capitol Records, which released albums in 2003 and 2006, but he blamed lack of support for slow sales and was dropped by the label. "The last five years I've been trying to find a new deal, trying to find a home, a label that wanted to take a chance."
