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The profile · researched 15 October 2026
Haley Reinhart and the slow build after Idol: a gum advert, her own label, and arenas by invitation
Fifteen years after finishing third on American Idol, the Chicago-born singer has turned a single Elvis cover into a double-platinum annuity and built a self-released catalogue around it. In 2026 she is splitting her year between opening arena bills for The Red Clay Strays and headlining jazz clubs and theatres, with a fifth album signalled by the April single "Promise".
Wheeling to Hollywood Week
Haley Reinhart was born on 9 September 1990 in Wheeling, Illinois, a suburb north-west of Chicago, and auditioned for the tenth season of American Idol in 2011. She finished third, behind Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina, having spent the back half of the run as the contestant the show's guests kept singling out — Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and Lady Gaga among them. Gaga handed her an unreleased song, "You and I", to perform on air.
Reinhart has since been blunt about what the format did to her. Speaking to PAPER in March 2025, she said the producers shaped narratives to suit the broadcast — "they're gonna do some sabotaging, they're gonna do some things to make great TV" — and described the years afterwards as work spent detaching her name from the show that supplied it.
The first attempt at that was Listen Up!, released on 22 May 2012 through Interscope and 19 Recordings. Its lead single "Free" peaked at number 104 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold around 61,000 copies in the United States. By the standards of a major-label debut from an Idol finalist it was a failure, and it ended the major-label phase of her career almost as soon as it began.
The cover that paid for everything after it
In 2015 Reinhart recorded a slowed, brushed-drum reading of Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Falling in Love". It was placed in Wrigley's Extra Gum advertisement "The Story of Sarah & Juan", released digitally in October 2015, and the song detached itself from the campaign and kept moving. The Recording Industry Association of America certified it gold in February 2017; she was presented with a double-platinum award in April 2023. The recording also brought her a Cannes Lion for Entertainment and a Clio for Best Use of Music in 2016, plus a Women in Sync award the same year.
Running alongside that was her work with Postmodern Jukebox, the collective that reframes contemporary pop as pre-war swing and lounge. Her lead vocal on their version of Radiohead's "Creep" spent 58 consecutive weeks on Billboard's Jazz Digital Songs chart. Her official biography puts the combined view count on her Postmodern Jukebox videos at around 300 million.
Both tracks did something unusual for a talent-show alumnus: they gave her a catalogue that earns without requiring radio, a label, or a hit cycle. Everything she has released since has been built on that base.
Four albums and her own imprint
Better arrived on 29 April 2016, independently, and reframed her as a retro-soul singer rather than a pop contender. What's That Sound? followed on 22 September 2017 through Concord Records, a set of 1960s material cut with a live band. Lo-Fi Soul, released on 27 March 2019, was the first record on Reinhart Records, the imprint she set up herself; the Bulletproof EP followed on 14 June 2019 and the Off the Ground EP on 2 September 2022.
The side work has been steady rather than decorative. She voiced Bill Murphy across all five seasons of the Netflix animation F Is for Family, made her film debut in Robert Rodriguez's We Can Be Heroes in 2020, and has cut four tracks across two albums with Jeff Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, including a performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. She also recorded "Something Strange" with Vicetone, which reached number 23 on Dance/Mix Show Airplay in 2018, and "Thunderclouds" with fellow Idol alumnus Kris Allen in 2023.
Her account of how she picks work is short. "I've said no to more things than I've said yes to because I trust my intuition," she told PAPER in 2025. By then the touring had become the business: the Off the Ground Tour ran from autumn 2022 into autumn 2023 across more than 100 theatres and rock rooms in North America, followed by a headline run through more than 75 cities between May and November 2024.
2026: "Promise", and a fifth album in the post
The current cycle began with "Danger", trailed in the March 2025 PAPER interview as the track that "captures all the things that make me the artist that I am" and floated as a possible album title. It remains unreleased and is still being played live.
The first release of 2026 came on 9 April: "Promise", co-written with her fiancé Drew Dolan, who also plays piano on it. Reinhart has framed it as the deliberate sequel to the Elvis cover — an original written to occupy the same territory of weddings and first dances rather than borrowing someone else's song to do it. Speaking to Digital Journal on 10 April 2026, she called it "my attempt to capture that same kind of magic — this time, with an original reflection on timeless devotion", and set out a position on method: "I'll always choose to make music that's raw and human. No shortcuts, no AI — just feeling with intention." The single is confirmed for her fifth album, which has no announced title or date.
The touring half of the year was announced on 28 May 2026, with tickets on sale from 29 May, split between her own headline shows and support slots marked separately on the itinerary.
Arenas as the opener, clubs as the headliner
The support slots are with The Red Clay Strays, the Alabama band whose 2026 headline dates Pollstar reported on 23 February 2026. Reinhart opens those bills below The Revivalists: the run began at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland on 30 July 2026 and resumed this month with Kia Center in Orlando on 14 October, Enmarket Arena in Savannah on 15 October, Credit One Stadium in Charleston on 17 October and Bon Secours Wellness Arena in Greenville on 18 October.
Around those dates she headlines rooms a fraction of the size. Two shows in one night at Middle C Jazz in Charlotte on 22 October, The Tin Pan in Richmond on 23 October, Sony Hall in New York on 27 October, a festival appearance in Athens in November, Yoshi's in Oakland on 20 November, then the Lansdowne Theater in Pennsylvania on 10 December and the Balboa Theatre in San Diego on 17 December. Twelve dates are currently listed between October and December.
The pattern is the point. The arena slots put a 30-minute set in front of crowds that have never heard of her; the club dates are where the 90-minute version of the show, and the new material, actually get played.
The show, now
Two shapes of show are running concurrently in 2026. The headline version, as played at The Center for Arts in Natick, Massachusetts on 1 August 2026, ran 85 minutes — on stage at 7.35pm, off at 9.00pm — and totalled 16 songs including a two-song encore, performed with a band rather than any orchestral or theatrical staging. It opened with "Good or Bad", "Behave" and "Wasted Tears", moved through Sharon Jones's "100 Days, 100 Nights" and "Honey, There's the Door", and then alternated originals with reworked covers: The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army", "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You", Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You" and Blind Faith's "Can't Find My Way Home". New and unreleased material sat late in the set — "Promise", then a "Free" medley folded into Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets", then the still-unreleased "Danger" and "Shook" — with the encore reserved for the two songs most of the room came for, "Can't Help Falling in Love" and the Postmodern Jukebox arrangement of Radiohead's "Creep". A longer 17-song variant at the Florida Theatre in Jacksonville on 9 April 2026 swapped in "Deep Water", "Crack the Code", "Cry Me a River" and "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which indicates a rotating rather than fixed set. On the arena dates this autumn she is first of three, opening below The Revivalists for The Red Clay Strays, so the set is compressed and the covers do more of the work. Earlier headline runs carried a single support act — Cami Clune opened the Kleinhans Music Hall date in Buffalo in June 2024 — and the current club dates are largely billed without a named opener; the Charlotte date on 22 October is two separate seated shows, at 6.00pm and 8.30pm.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · haleyreinhart.com · digitaljournal.com · papermag.com · haleyreinhartnews.com · haleyreinhartnews.com · news.pollstar.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Justin Higuchi · CC BY 2.0
Michael Tanne · CC BY-SA 2.0
Michael Tanne · CC BY-SA 2.0
Justin Higuchi · CC BY 2.0
Justin Higuchi from Los Angeles, CA, USA · CC BY 2.0
Hauke Musicaloris · CC BY 2.0
iZilla at flickR from Berlin, Germany · CC0
Justin Higuchi · CC BY 2.0
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