Jordin Sparks on Losing and Finding Your Spark, Again and Again

There’s an unexpected moment in the first episode of Jordin Sparks’s new podcast where her voice breaks. It’s when she’s talking about American Idol—not the glittery, youngest-winner-at-17 part everyone knows, but what was happening offstage that rarely surfaces on a typical press tour. There were several close deaths she was mourning during and immediately after her season. Her parents’ separation. Panic attacks so severe she was convinced she was dying.

“I’ve never talked about it,” she says on What’s Your Spark?, out now through Dear Media. “My family knows, and like my close friends know, but I’ve never actually talked about that part of my life. Because nobody ever asks.”

For someone who’s spent nearly two decades in public view, it’s a vulnerable moment she’s reliving, and it gets at something central to what Sparks is attempting with What’s Your Spark?: It’s not just another celebrity interview show, but an excavation of what keeps you going beneath the carefully manicured version you present to the world.

The question nobody asks

Sparks had been mulling over the idea for What’s Your Spark? for years, but what finally clicked was realizing she wanted to create the kind of conversation she rarely gets to have herself—one that goes beyond professional achievements into the more granular question of what actually lights someone up. “A lot of my interviews kind of revolve around either what I’m working on at the time or my music or things that have already been discussed over and over again,” Sparks explains during our interview. “We never get the time to go underneath all of that.”

But it turns out the show’s central question—what’s your spark?—is harder to answer than it sounds, and even Sparks stops to give it further thought before answering the same question herself.

“I’m learning that it’s something that you can find, you can lose, you can be unsure of, and sometimes it’s not something that’s right at the forefront,” Sparks says. For herself right now, the answer is discovery: “I am discovering new layers about myself. I’m discovering new wants, new dreams, and maybe I’m discovering old dreams that have been put on the shelf that I’m kind of dusting off.”

The pressure that never left

One might think Sparks is unshakeable having achieved success at a young age and after decades of being shaped by industry machinery. But the truth, she says, is that the pressure shifts but never really disappears. “Most days I’m tired of the pressure, if I’m being completely honest with you,” she admits. “I’m just like, why does it have to feel so tight and heavy sometimes when I’m not in a lab trying to cure something that affects so many people? I’m making music, I’m being creative. Why is the pressure to do this so hard?”

At 17, it was about being new, learning the industry, making sure the album was good. Then it became about matching her own success, filling her own shoes. Then about growing up in public, about parenting, about “keeping your sanity” while maintaining the version of herself that feels authentic.

“Almost 20 years and I can still feel this pressure and try and decide how I’m going to look at it today,” she says. “Because every day it changes.”

This evolution—the way external demands morph across a life lived publicly—rarely gets discussed with this level of granularity. Most celebrity narratives either dwell on early trauma or skip straight to hard-won wisdom. Sparks is trying to map the middle ground: still in process, still negotiating, still sometimes nervous right before getting close to the mic.

The architecture of confidence

People often cite early childhood confidence as exceptional, the same certainty that Sparks had as a teenager. But confidence, Sparks notes, “is also the same” as pressure—always shifting, always requiring renegotiation. “I’ve always had this internal confidence in myself. I’ve always believed in myself, and I’ve always believed in my voice and what it can do,” she says. But that doesn’t mean knowing how everything will turn out.

“I didn’t know I was going to win American Idol. I knew if I got on it and had the opportunity and all the variables lined up that I’d be able to and that I could, but I didn’t know what was going to happen,” she says.

So when asked to give advice to someone struggling with purpose now, Sparks doesn’t respond with an easy platitude. “Sometimes it doesn’t come at a young age. I think I was very lucky to know innately,” she says.

She does offer some advice for those still searching. “When you look at yourself in the mirror and you tell yourself who you are,” she carefully explains, “if that brings a smile to your face, you have to hold onto that.” It’s about not losing sight and knowing yourself well enough that “it’s easy to make the decisions, to have the answers to be like, ‘Yeah, no, I’m not going to do that.’ Or, Yes, I’ll do this, or this aligns with me and this doesn’t.”

At this very moment, she’s aware she might not be making sense, so she pauses then adds: “People want such clear answers, and they can only be clear for you when you’re willing to look at them and willing to do the work to discover yourself.”

Lightness as methodology

What distinguishes What’s Your Spark? from the therapeutic tenor of other shows is Sparks’s insistence on approaching heavy topics with what she calls her “sunshiny” disposition. Sunshine is what she’s chosen to preserve in a self-help obsessed world that often privileges darkness and confession.

“The world can be so crazy, and sometimes it feels like it’s closing in, tunnel vision, just darkness around,” she says. “But if there’s darkness, there’s always light, there’s always the other side to balance everything.” Her outlook: “The glass for me, people are like, Well, is the glass half empty or is it half full? And I’m like, Well, it’s always full because it’s going to have water and it’s going to have air, so it’s always full.”

This isn’t toxic positivity—she’s just finished crying on mic about panic attacks and compounded grief—but rather an intentional framing. “We’ve got enough things in this world that make us feel worse and make us feel terrible,” she explains. “I always want people to feel better than when they left.”

The practices that ground

In order to maintain that outlook, she has her rituals: custom tea blends (rosemary, clove, eucalyptus), constant attention to breathing, cooking, lots of reading. Right now she’s into fantasy romance series that allow her to “live a thousand different lives,” and she carries multiple books in her bag at all times.

Being “me all the time,” she says, “gets to be a lot,” which is why books are her comfort. “Can I just not have to talk about me or think about a decision I have to make for my career and all the different things for just a second? So I open up my book and I’m like, Okay, I can think about whatever issues they’re going through.”

Breathing, particularly, has threaded through her entire career in ways both literal and metaphorical—from controlling breath while singing to calming pre-stage nerves to her Broadway debut song to her hit single. “In the stressful world that we have, breathing is the one thing that we can do and control,” she says. “If everybody would take a second to lower their shoulders and to breathe, clarity comes through.”

What to expect on What’s Your Spark?

At 35, Sparks isn’t positioning herself as the person with answers but as someone equally curious and equally in process. She knows her name is immediately recognizable, but she’s not so overexposed that there’s nothing left to reveal. What’s Your Spark? represents the idea that’s always something more to learn, that our lives our rich and textured, that it’s worth sharing in case someone else can see their story inside of yours.

“I feel like I’ve done a good job of being an open book, but I also am really good at being able to share just enough that people feel like they’ve gotten a lot,” she admits. “But there’s really so much more and so many more details and more depth to stories that I have and my journey that people don’t really know about.”

Nearly 18 years after American Idol, she’s still animated by the same fundamental belief: If the variables line up, she can win whatever it is. The variables, of course, are rarely in anyone’s control. But the belief in possibility—that’s the spark she’s kept lit, the thing she’s finally ready to examine out loud.

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