About Me
Benson James Boone is an American singer and songwriter known for his strong vocal performance and emotional lyrics in his contemporary pop music. Boone burst onto the national scene as a contestant on *American Idol* in early 2021, which he left on his own terms. Then he began his career in music as an independent musician, promoting his songs on the Internet. He was popular worldwide with his soulful songs and emotional voice. In his career he released some very popular singles and became a well-known young musician of the contemporary pop music.
Benson Boone – American singer-songwriter
Benson Boone (born June 25, 2002, Monroe, Washington, United States) is a musician whose fame rose through gaining a large fan base through social media applications such as TikTok and his appearance in the American Idol singing contest show. Boone has been successful in his music career, where he has chart-topping songs and an intriguing stage performance that entails him doing flips.
Early life and American Idol
Benson Boone is one of five siblings, born to Nate and Kerry Boone. He was raised in Monroe, Washington. Boone “didn’t know [he] could sing” in his youth, spending much of his high school career as a competitive diver. He was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but told Rolling Stone in 2025 that he no longer identifies solely with the church. He attended Brigham Young University for a short period before dropping out to pursue music.
Boone was a contestant on American Idol in 2021 at age 18. Boone sang British singer-songwriter Aidan Martin’s “Punchline” at his audition and judge and pop star Katy Perry told Boone, “I see you winning American Idol if you want to.” Boone, despite the glowing review, dropped out of the competition after making it into the top 24. Boone, in a 2022 interview on the podcast The Zach Sang Show, said he quit the show because he wanted to pursue a music career, but without feeling like he owed anything to the show. He later told The Scott Mills Breakfast Show that Perry had inspired his decision to go.
Popular Tracks by Benson Boone
Shortly after Boone was discovered and signed to Imagine Dragons singer Dan Reynolds’ label, Nite Street Records. In 2021, Boone released his first single, “Ghost Town.” While dismissed in the U.S. as a “poreless ballad designed to show off his husky, nominally soulful voice,” the song was a huge hit in Europe, topping the charts in Norway and hitting the top 10 in Belgium and Denmark. But in the United States, the single barely made the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 100. “Ghost Town” from Boone’s debut album Fireworks & Rollerblades (2024) out via Nite Street and Warner Records. The album itself was not reviewed by many major US publications including Pitchfork and The New York Times.
Boone dropped the first single from his debut album, “Beautiful Things,” in 2024. The song was one of the year’s “inescapable hits,” according to The New York Times. It peaked at number 2 and remained on the Billboard Hot 200 for 80 weeks. Boone sang the song at the 2025 Grammy Awards show, throwing in his trademark backflips for good measure. Nite Street and Warner Records released his second album, American Heart, in 2025, with 3 of its 10 songs reaching the Billboard Hot 100.
Boone was an early magnet for brand collaboration and had more than nine million followers on the short-form content app TikTok as of August 2025. (As The New York Times put it, “If you asked a social media executive to design a pop star with maximum virality in mind, they might show you someone like Benson Boone.”) In 2025, Boone teamed up with dessert chain Crumbl to create the “Moonbeam Ice Cream Cookie,” named after a line in Boone’s song “Mystical Magical.” It was the first limited-time dessert to hit Crumbl’s rotating flavor menu for two weeks in a row, and fans did the song (and assorted backflips) at Crumbl locations as part of a social media trend.
Reception
The example of Boone illustrates how the commercial success does not necessarily correlate with critical praise. Pitchfork music website gave 3.7 out of 10 marks for Boone’s work titled American Heart, complemented by a very negative review: “There is one of the main laws of reviewing that I need to violate here: criticizing an artist for failing to do something he/she did not intend to do, namely, to create good songs.” The New York Times characterizes Boone as a complex person who is “at once political and apolitical, flamboyant and God-fearing, wildly successful, yet somehow very ordinary.”
On the Internet, Boone is criticized by many fans who call him “inauthentic.” This particular criticism is answered by Boone in his music video “Mr. Electric Blue,” 2025. In the music video that presents more of a skit than a music performance, Boone confronts the executives of Industry Plant Records (the accusation of being “planted” by the music industry instead of becoming successful independently), wearing a T-shirt with “One Hit Wonder” on it. (Also see 7 One-Hit Wonders That Kept Us Wondering).
Personal life
Boone has been dating actress and social media star Maggie Thurmon since early 2024. Boone, while speaking to Billboard about his new single “Beautiful Things,” mentioned that the lyrics in the song were influenced by a new romance: “For the first time in my life, I felt like I was extremely out of control of the way this relationship would turn out.” Boone did not mention Thurmon by name, but many fans believe the song is about their relationship.