‘I will never have a faith crisis again’ — how McKenna Breinholt found her voice, her birth family and her faith again

“You go from having all eyes on you to no eyes on you within a week.” That’s how McKenna Breinholt describes the experience of being in the spotlight of “American Idol” and then getting eliminated from the show.
Breinholt’s audition for “American Idol,” where she performed “There was Jesus” by Zach Williams and Dolly Parton, went viral and was featured in the promotional video for the season’s premiere. But the show offered another life-altering moment.
After Katy Perry asked Breinholt to invite her family into the studio for the judges’ final votes, Breinholt, who was adopted as a baby, opened the door to find several members of her birth family, whom she’d never met before, standing there — two aunts, an uncle and a grandmother.
The nation watched the heart-wrenching scene as Breinholt stood in disbelief. “Knowing that I have another family out there who is equally excited to know and love me was amazing,” she said in an “American Idol” video.
Within minutes, Breinholt’s parents and her birth family huddled around her at the white grand piano as she sang “Tumbleweed,” a song that had been performed by Breinholt’s birth mother, who died in 2013.
Breinholt went on to advance in the competition until May, when, during a vote for the top five contestants, she was eliminated, along with another singer, Julia Gagnon.
Coming off the show has been disorienting for the 26-year-old, she told me in a conversation over Zoom. She described it as a kind of career — and identity — crisis after the show. “I had this huge high and then it all came crashing down,” she said.
She even lost Instagram followers, something she didn’t care about until the show. (To be fair, she’s still got plenty: 162,000.) “You’re exposed to so much fame and so much fun, but you just kind of forget who you are and what you want to even do for yourself because it’s so much being thrown at you for such a short period of time.” Then, she said, “It’s just all taken away from you.”
But in recent months, Breinholt has been on the precipice of a new beginning. She’s been recovering from surgery she had in July to remove a polyp from her vocal cords. During the break from singing, she started writing her own music for the first time. She wrote and recorded two songs, one of them inspired by her path of recovery from alcohol and drug addiction.
“Now I am here with my voice fully back,” she said. When we spoke, she was gearing up for a fireside for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where she would share her story of adoption and faith. She also had a gig planned in Bisbee, Arizona, just a few hours away, where her birth mother, Amy Ross Lopez, used to perform. “It feels that I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”
But there were times, Breinholt said, that she didn’t think she would end up here.
Breinholt grew up in Gilbert, Arizona, playing piano and later picking up guitar. Her mother, Lisa Breinholt, remembered her 6-year-old daughter sounding out the tunes from “Sesame Street” and other shows on a toy piano at home. “She’s kind of had a photographic memory for sound,” Lisa told me. “If she’s heard it before, she could play it.”
At 16, she joined an orchestral group, Cinematic Pop, which performed hit song covers with instrumental arrangements. The 2015 performance, where Breinholt sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” with the orchestra, went viral (it now has 13 million views), and Breinholt, along with the group, was invited to perform for “America’s Got Talent.” But despite the unanimous “yes” from the judges, the group withdrew from the competition, citing logistical problems. A few years later, a producer she met at the show would reach out to Breinholt and invite her to audition for “American Idol.”
In high school, Breinholt thrived socially and was part of a “cool” group of friends, she says, which included student council members and athletes. But she also struggled with low self-esteem and confidence and often felt like an outcast. “There was always someone prettier and skinnier,” she said. “I didn’t like myself at all in high school.” Even when she sang for her family, Lisa recalled, she’d ask her audience to turn around to avoid looking directly at them.
She sang at big school events and received accolades for her talent. But the praise often came with the feeling of being confined to a mold, an identity and expectations imposed on her by others.
“So I said ‘scratch that’ — I’m not going to be anything you guys want me to be,” she told me. After high school, she started hanging out with friends who struggled with substance abuse and self-image. She began vaping and grew distant from her other friends.
“I totally lost my sense of self of who I was,” she said. She began experimenting with other, more addictive drugs and for several years, she says she “fell off the deep end.” She moved from one friend’s couch to another, until she decided to just sleep in her car. This living arrangement gave her the illusion of freedom, but eventually she began to feel that addiction would win over if she didn’t turn her life around. “When I’m in the midst of all of that stuff, I lose my voice, I lose my light, I lose my drive — everything,” she said.
One evening, while she was at her parents’ home, working on getting sober, she recalled feeling a “dark tornado of energy and bad thoughts” coming on. She called her parents, but they weren’t going to be home until later. She got an inkling to drive over to the house of her guitar and voice teacher, who was a priesthood leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had been Breinholt’s longtime mentor and family friend. Breinholt had always believed in God, but she began questioning her faith while she was wrestling with addiction.
“I want a blessing,” she said when she arrived on her teacher’s doorstep. He put his hands on her head and “the most powerful words came out,” she said. At home that night, her eyes fell on a dusty set of scriptures. She picked them up and began reading, for the first time in years. She stumbled on a verse from the Doctrine & Covenants, one of the Latter-day Saint books of scriptures: “I speak unto you that are chosen in this thing, even as one, that you may enter into my rest,” she read out loud. Overcome by a sense of love and belonging, she couldn’t sleep the whole night, overwhelmed by what felt like “this letter from God to me,” she said.
“God should have turned his back on the things I was choosing to do,” she said. “Looking back, I see so many blessings that I was given throughout that time.”
Although Breinholt had always known that she was adopted, in her 20s she became curious about her birth family. When she was 21, she asked her parents to tell her everything they knew about her birth mother.
She learned that Amy was a singer who was part of the indie duo “Nowhere Man and a Whiskey Girl” and who also struggled with addiction. “She never dealt with any of it until she passed away,” Breinholt told me.
She watched videos of her birth mother singing, recognizing the commonalities of their features — the mannerisms, facial expressions, the timbre of their voices. “It was a lot to process, but I instantly knew where I got my ear from,” she said in the “American Idol” video. “It just all clicked.”
Last summer, she stumbled upon an interview Amy had given on YouTube, and decided to reach out to the interviewer to see if she could learn more about her.
She got an email the next morning that she’s reread dozens of times since. “We listened to all the music of years we could find, we put pictures side by side … we were not sure how it would impact your life for us to reach out,” wrote Breinholt’s birth aunt, Amy’s sister.
Just like Breinholt, her birth family, too, had been wondering about her life and tried to get to know her through videos on the internet. Breinholt connected with her newfound family over video and began making plans to meet in person.
But Breinholt’s parents, Lisa and Garin, devised a plan to speed up the reunion, without their daughter knowing. Lisa told me she wanted there to be a record of the reunion — as a public continuation of Amy’s story, now with Breinholt being part of it. Then “American Idol” producers offered Breinholt’s parents the opportunity to document the reunion on the air. “It was kind of scary — we didn’t know how they were going to edit it, what would end of up on the cutting room floor,” Lisa said.
Their efforts resulted in the surprise reunion the nation witnessed on the show.
In the video of her audition, Breinholt — with a generous smile, white teeth and dark auburn hair — is calm and confident and maybe a tinge sad. “Storytelling, smoky voice, and I love the little cry in your voice,” Lionel Richie said after Breinholt finished singing. Katy Perry loved the audition, too, and asked Breinholt about her adoption story. And musicians Zach Williams and Dolly Parton recorded a video reacting to Breinholt’s audition of their song.
“Speechless,” Williams said in the video.
“We felt like it was a blessing for you to sing it,” Parton added.
As Breinholt is finding her footing, both musically and spiritually, she can now reflect on all the things she’s learned. And she wants to share her story, as she recently did on “The Rollercoaster Podcast.”
She’s also felt the deep-seated insecurity of her teenage years ebb away. “Honestly, I didn’t feel that confident until last year,” she told me.
She can now see the dark times in her life as a learning experience that altered the direction of her life, and renewed the foundation for her faith. “I will never have a faith crisis again, because I’ve been the lowest that I will ever be before,” she said. “And knowing that God stuck with me through all of that — and looking at where my life is now and how all of that was necessary for me to get to where I am now — it makes my faith so strong now.”