Six years ago on The X Factor USA Season 2, a lovable lady named Panda Ross captured America’s hearts — and seemingly the heart of her longtime crush, judge Simon Cowell — with her big personality and big voice. “You sound like a legend!” Cowell told Ross after she fearlessly serenaded him with an eyebrow-raisingly lusty “Bring It on Home to Me.” But oddly, Ross was not seen or heard again that season — much to the disappointment of her “Panda Fandas.” A year later, she tried out for The X Factor USA again, but that time, her footage didn’t even air at all. However, this time may be the charm for the 48-year-old gospel/R&B belter. Ross just auditioned for The X Factor U.K., and after receiving four yeses, she has a feeling that her vintage style may be more popular across the pond.

“It was my first time to England, and it was amazing. The food was gross; I can’t get used to their food, because they don’t cook with a lot of flavoring, and I’m used to our greasy, saucy American food,” Ross laughingly tells Yahoo Entertainment in an exclusive interview. “But I will say this: Over there, doesn’t matter your culture, your age, and none of that. They just love music. They like women my age! In America — I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true — if you’re past 25, you’re washed up, unless you’re Beyoncé. They’re just not into old-school, old folk singers. That’s not what America’s into. I’ve come to find out that the people overseas are just more accepting of older people. They don’t even look at age. They don’t really look at color. They just like music. I think I got a good chance over there, as long as I keep on doing what I’m doing.”

Ross says that when she was approached by the show this year, she initially turned down an invitation to audition because she had “ a lot going on” in her life — namely her husband’s battle with lung cancer. But she says the producers were “really persistent,” and it was her husband who encouraged her to go for it. “He said, ‘Hey, this is what you’ve been fighting for and wanting. This has been your destiny since 2012. You need to go for it, and you need to give it your all.’ So, I went for it.” Sadly, Ross’s husband passed away shortly after her audition.

When my husband died a couple weeks ago. @SimonCowell was the first to send flowers to the funeral home and it made me smile on the inside. pic.twitter.com/VmQQwo5oJQ

— Panda Ross (@RealPandaRoss) September 23, 2018

When Ross returned to The X Factor, much had changed in her life since her time on the short-lived American version of the TV talent show. Along with getting married, she’d lost more than 60 pounds through gastric bypass surgery. So, when she showed up in England, her old “boo” Cowell didn’t even recognize her at first. “When I came out, I don’t think he knew it was Panda,” she chuckles. “They asked my name, and he kind of had his head down. I said, ‘Panda,’ and he looked up and I was like, ‘Hey Simon, it’s me, your ex-baby mama! He said, ‘Panda!? Oh my God, come here!’” He made me come down off the stage, and we literally stood there talking to each other for three or four minutes. Then he turned around and told the whole crowd, ‘This here is a very special woman, and you guys are in for a treat.’” Still, Cowell, despite his preexisting fondness for Ross, wasn’t going to give her special treatment. So, when he disapproved of her original (unaired) audition song choice, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” (he thought it was “too easy” for her), he interrupted her during the fourth verse and sent her backstage to work on a second option, Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman.” Ross says she was “devastated.” “I am probably the only black woman I know that has never been a huge fan of Aretha Franklin’s music!” Ross reveals. “It’s only because her voice is so different from mine, so unique and high. I always knew that I could never reach those ranges, so I just never got into her music. I don’t even attempt to sing it.” Incredibly, Ross didn’t know the song beyond the chorus, but since she didn’t know Cowell’s other suggestion — “Never Enough,” from The Greatest Showman — at all, she went with “Natural Woman,” rehearsed it for a half hour … and “killed it. When I got through, the whole stadium was on their feet roaring.” “What you just did with the song particularly at the end was pure magic,” Cowell told Ross. “We go back a few years, but I’ve always wanted you to have this moment. I will never forget that, Panda.”

@ThePerezHilton last thing Perez look out for me tonite on Xfactor UK and see me and Simons reunion on the other side of the pond. pic.twitter.com/E73kjyhYZR

— Panda Ross (@RealPandaRoss) September 22, 2018

Ross’s post-audition joy was brief, however, once her husband took a turn for the worse and his cancer advanced to Stage 4, and she seriously considered dropping out of the competition, even though producers and her own husband kept urging her to stay. “I wasn’t trying to hear nobody. I was just trying to get back to the States and take care of my husband,” she says. “The main producer/director, he called me. He’s also a believer in Christ, and he said, ‘Panda, one of the reasons that you’re here is because I’ve been following you since 2012. And you never got what you deserved when you were in the U.S. This is your time and this is your season, and you need to go for it. I can’t guarantee they’re going to pick you, because everything is left to the judges, but I feel like you really need to stay, and you need to give it your all.’”

Undeterred, Ross flew back to Dallas to be at her dying husband’s bedside, but in her final moments with him, he encouraged her to continue chasing her X Factor dream. “He pushed me every step of the way with this, down to his last minute,” she recalls. “The night before he died, I was holding his hand. He couldn’t talk anymore. I said, ‘I’m supposed to go to L.A. [to shoot the next stage of the show] come Sunday, and if you still want me to do this, I need you to squeeze my hand.’ And he squeezed my hand. He wanted me to do it.”

Ross confesses that she’s “actually not OK,” but she takes solace from “loving the Lord Jesus Christ and having a man who as well felt the same way I did. I know he’s in a better place now.” She says, “I didn’t take [his death] well. When it happened, anxiety and depression kicked in right away. I literally could not get out of my bed. I couldn’t do anything.” When Ross eventually went back to the show, she “just lost it” when she heard some contestants singing Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud,” the song to which she walked down the aisle at her wedding three years ago. But she stresses, “I’m determined to finish what I started.”

And Ross believes that her husband will be watching her and the United Kingdom will be rooting for her, as she takes musical chances and embraces her new British audience. While she can’t reveal show far she has made it on the show so far, she has big plans. “I’m doing George Michael’s ‘Freedom,’ and that’s way out of my genre. I cannot even begin to sing it!” she says. “But I’m trying different things. I’m listening to the U.K. people, and I’m hearing stuff that they are listening to. I’ve always said that I wanted to be someone who was all things to all people, and if I want to connect with these people, I need to sing music that they like. I think once they fall in love with that part of me, then even if I sing something that I’m more comfortable with, something ‘more American,’ by then I will have won the crowd over.”

The X Factor U.K. airs in the U.S. on AXS TV Sunday nights.

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

When Jeff Gutt gave his first performance as the new lead singer for Stone Temple Pilots, at a secret L.A. industry showcase in November 2016, he wasn’t that nervous. As a onetime X Factor USA contestant, he’d had plenty of experience covering other artists’ songs, and as the former frontman for several estblished rock bands, he knew how to work a crowd. But he still felt pressure — not only because he had to late fill iconic STP frontman Scott Weiland’s shoes but because the singer who replaced Weiland from 2013 to 2015, Chester Bennington, was in the audience that day.

“I knew Chester. I’ve known Chester since 2001,” Gutt reveals to Yahoo Entertainment. “I was in a band called Dry Cell, and we were signed by the same guy that signed Linkin Park, so that’s how I knew him. He would come to some of our writing sessions and rehearsals; I’d see him in the studios that we were at. When we were recording, they’d be recording there. We just had a good friendship.”

Gutt and Bennington were such good friends, in fact, that Bennington invited himself to the L.A. showcase. “It my first private audition with STP, and he called and asked if he could come. He wanted to be there for that first show. So, I put him on my guest list. It was very cool that he could be there for that.” Bennington even ended up jumping onstage to sing a couple of songs with Stone Temple Pilots, in what must have felt like a torch-passing moment at the time.

Photo: Rhino/Warner Bros.

After the show, Bennington told Gutt he’d done an “awesome” job, and Bennington’s company at the event kept Gutt calm. “I was pretty much hanging out with him, because I’ve known him for so long,” Gutt chuckles.

Little did Gutt know that just eight months after he received Bennington’s encouragement and blessing, Bennington would be dead. Both Weiland and Bennington — incredibly charismatic and talented, if troubled, performers — were only in their forties when they died. “I’m actually the same age as Chester. I needed a couple of days, I’m not going to lie,” Gutt says about his reaction to the tragic news of Bennington’s suicide. “It was a shocker. I mean, I feel for his family and kids and his wife. It’s horrible.”

However, Gutt found comfort during studio sessions with his also-grieving new bandmates, STP guitarist Dean DeLeo, bassist Robert DeLeo, and drummer Eric Kretz. “We were recording at the time. We just really talked to each other and shared each other’s feelings about it,” he says. “It was very good to be around people, because I was going to be like, ‘Hey, I need a couple of days off,’ and they were like, ‘You should come to the studio. Come over and let’s hang out.’ I remember I just wanted to hide, but we went in the studio and some beautiful, beautiful songs were made. And they’re real. That’s the best part.”

Recalling Bennington’s positive attitude, Gutt says, “Everyone just wants to see STP do well, and he was one of those people, for sure.” And it makes sense that fans and friends would want to root for Stone Temple Pilots, after all they went through with Weiland — who battled drug addiction for most of his tenure with the band and even derailed STP’s career when he went to jail for five months in 1999. They’ve always alt-rock underdogs. And so has Gutt, a 41-year-old single dad, in his own way. After being eliminated before the live shows of The X Factor Season 1, he returned in Season 3 and made it all the way to the finale, but he still had to settle for second place. At the time, The X Factor seemed like his last chance, but he figured going on a national television could help him make “the biggest splash.”

“I had walked away from the music industry because I had a certain integrity and all that. Then when I needed to come back, it was years later, because I didn’t want to give up on my dream,” Gutt says. “That was why I chose television. I had always looked down upon those [reality/talent] shows, just because those people stand in line for a day and get their shot. And I’d spent 20 years in bars and nightclubs, dealing with promoters and getting ripped off and just everything that comes with all that stuff — paying your dues, I guess. I did that over and over and over again, so I figured, you know what? If someone’s going to go on one of these shows and win it, it could be someone authentic and real and doing it for all the right reasons.”

Gutt didn’t win, but becoming the new singer of Stone Temple Pilots, a band he grew up with, is a bigger prize than any Syco Records deal. The revamped STP’s self-titled album (not to be confused with 2010’s Stone Temple Pilots, the group’s last LP with Weiland), comes out March 16, and Gutt says, “I’m just really excited for the record itself, because it’s the first time I’ve actually had a record released on a major label. I’ve been trying my whole life to get to this point, and it’s finally here. It’s an amazing record, and it happens to be with Stone Temple Pilots. I mean, what could be better than that?”

Gutt promises the album will be “everything a superfan of STP would want” with a classic sound that honors Weiland and Bennington’s legacies — even as he finds his own voice within the lineup. “I love Scott, so that’s definitely part of what I put into this. I’m very respectful. I listen to everything [the STP band members] have to say, and I just try to be me at the end of the day, because that’s the only thing I can do,” he says. “I have my own story, and my story is meeting with their story. It’s a very awesome thing that we come together and help each other out.”

Listen to the exclusive premiere of the new Stone Temple Pilots track  “­­­­Never Enough” above, and watch the DeLeos and Kretz discuss Weiland and Bennington in the video below.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

In 2016, pop singer and former child star Bea Miller was having a fantastic day in New York City, enjoying some productive studio sessions with co-writer Steph Jones for her sophomore album, Aurora. Then she posted a photo of herself in a tank top — and some nasty Instagram troll tried to ruin her day. But Miller and Jones turned this incident into a teachable moment, and the result was “S.L.U.T.,” a perfect anthem for International Women’s Day that transforms the hurtful epithet into something positive and empowering. “I remember feeling so good about myself, being like, ‘Steph, look at my outfit. I feel so cute. We’re about to have a fun day today, write a great song!’ I was really feeling myself. I was in a great mood,” Miller tells Yahoo Entertainment. Then she posted a mirror selfie, and “I just so happened to see this girl comment with something along the lines of, ‘You’re such a slut! I can’t believe you’re not wearing a bra! This is so inappropriate, and I can’t believe that you’re encouraging your fans to act like that.’”

Miller stresses that her shirt wasn’t see-through — “You could maybe see the outline of the fact that I do have nipples, wow, shocker!” — but notes that the girl’s comment would not have been OK under any circumstances. “You can’t really say anything if I’m comfortable with it. It doesn’t matter. It’s my body. But it wasn’t see-through. It was not an inappropriate outfit. I just remember sitting there and thinking to myself, ‘Girl, you’re another woman. … You should support other women.’ You should see a girl posting a picture of herself — clearly she posted it because she felt good about herself — and you should lift her up and be inspired by it … rather than attacking me. Also, I feel like it makes men think it’s OK to tear women down when they see other women doing it. If one woman calls another woman a slut, I feel like men are like, ‘Oh well, if women call each other that, I guess we can, too’ — which is a huge problem.” However, when Jones looked up “slut” in the Urban Dictionary and saw the acronym “Sweet Little Unforgettable Thing,” Miller had an epiphany. “I remember she read that out loud to me, and my eyes widened and I was like, ‘Steph, we have to make a song about this. We have to turn this girl trying to ruin my good day that I was having, and take this girl trying to take my power away and use it to help other women and give them their power back.’ We took something that could have ruined my day and made me feel really bad about myself and turned it into a positive message for other people.” On the song, Miller defiantly sings, “I love myself, I wanna see it/When I turn around, look in the mirror/And if you don’t like it, you can leave it/’Cause it’s my own and I’ll keep owning it/If you don’t like what I’m wearing/Well, you’re only bothered ’cause you’re staring/And you’ll never talk me into caring/’Cause it’s my own and I’ll keep owning it.” Miller says she actually wanted to call the song “Slut,” not “S.L.U.T.,” but “that was so politically incorrect, you would say that and [radio] people would be like, ‘We can’t play this song,’ or ‘We can’t talk about it.’ But that is the whole reason why I wrote the song, because the word shouldn’t be so [controversial]. People that get called a ‘slut’ are people that are literally just being comfortable in their own skin and doing nothing, not actually doing anything that the word ‘slut’ originally meant. And it doesn’t even matter if they are. Girls can do whatever they want with themselves and their bodies. If they feel comfortable and happy doing it, then a negative thing shouldn’t be put on you. It’s actually interesting that the title had to be changed, because people just hearing the word would be immediately turned away from it.” So far, though, the song is getting plenty of attention, with its uplifting video racking up nearly 3 million views on YouTube. “I just wanted to make a video where I got a bunch of different women who are physically different, have come from different places, different walks of life, just different experiences, and just get them together to put on outfits that they feel good in, that no one else is there to judge them for,” Miller says of video shoot. “Everyone on set was so awesome. I just wanted everyone to feel comfortable, wear clothes that they felt good in, regardless of what everybody else would ever think, and just dance and be free. I just wanted to capture women feeling free and just acting in power instead of acting from being scared about what other people think of them. Some of them, including me, maybe we’re wearing outfits that would be considered offensive to people or too revealing or whatever — but who cares? Who cares if we want to show yourself off, then good for us.” Miller is aware that she’ll continue to attract haters online — something she initially experienced in a major way when she went on The X Factor, Season 2, years ago, when she was just 12 years old and known as Beatrice. “That was the first time that my bubble of the outside world kind of popped,” recalls Miller, who grew up with two mothers. “I was raised in a really awesome, super-diverse community where there were a lot of gay parents, a lot of lesbian parents, a very diverse community. [People on social media] were telling me that I was a sin, like me as a person, because the fact that two moms had a kid together was so sinful. Terrible things that were just so awful, so closed-minded, and just kind of disgusting. But it’s OK. We just have to make it our mission to try to change those people’s minds, or at least get them to leave us alone if they won’t.” Miller thinks she might get more flak online than other pop singers because people are unable to accept that she has evolved from a tween reality star into a 19-year-old grown woman — but believes she garners backlash mainly because she’s unafraid to voice her opinions. Growing up not only with two moms but with siblings adopted from Vietnam and a trans brother, it’s important for her to speak up for immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ community, no matter the reactions she receives.

Bea Miller (Photo: Hollywood Records)

“I feel like I have a lot more trolls than a lot of people just because I speak my mind more than other people do,” she shrugs. “I do it because I feel not enough people in general are honest and talk about what they’re generally feeling — especially not enough young women. I think sometimes we just feel like people don’t really care what we have to say. Or at least I do sometimes; I feel like no one’s going listen to me. But that’s the opposite mindset that we should have. We’re very strong and very important, and our opinions are valid and they should be heard. “I just like to speak my mind, and so a lot of people don’t really like me for that. A lot of people appreciate it and like me more because of that, but a lot of people are like, ‘Well, you should just shut up. We never asked for your opinion.’ It’s like, OK, well, it doesn’t mean I’m not going to give it to you.” Watch Bea Miller’s entire Yahoo Entertainment Facebook Live chat in the video below. Follow Lyndsey on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Amazon, Tumblr, Spotify This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

“Twice, yup,” says Gallagher. “A guy calls me who works at Sony Records; he’s a good friend of mine I’ve known for years and years and years. His office was across the hall from Simon Cowell’s. Simon Cowell knew this guy was a friend of mine, and this guy called me up and he said, ‘Simon Cowell’s asking for your phone number, can I give it to him?’ I said, ‘What does he want it for?’ He said, ‘I have no idea.’ I thought he might want a song for one of the X Factor winners. A couple weeks pass, nothing happens and I’ve forgotten all about it, and then one Sunday afternoon this girl calls and says, ‘I’m Simon Cowell’s assistant, is it OK to call you in about five minutes?’ And he offered me the job to replace him when he first left The X Factor. I think to this day I’m still the only person who ever turned him down.”

(A representative for The X Factor tells Yahoo Music that Gallagher was merely “considered,” and was never formally offered a job on the show.)

Gallagher insists that it “wasn’t for any novel reasons about music, blah blah blah and all that” that he said no to Simon and a reported £2 million salary. “It’s for the simple reason that I don’t want to be on TV every Saturday night. [The X Factor U.K. airs on Saturdays.] I’ve got better things to do. And with being on TV every Saturday night comes the endless promotion to do that. And I don’t want to be a TV star, you know?

“I explained all this to Simon Cowell, and I do like him; I’ve met him on several occasions. And he was being very f—ing insistent that it didn’t matter, we could work around [my schedule], we could do it. I said, ‘Well, I’ve got an album coming out.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about that either.’ I found it mildly amusing for a while and then he said, ‘Well, just think about it and I’ll call you back.’ And I said, ‘I’ve already thought about it, I don’t want to do it,’ and we left it at that.

“But then a year later I got a call, or my management got a call: ‘The album is finished now. Is he in any way interested now?’ But I don’t want to be on TV. Saturday night is for playing with my wife, f—ing getting drunk. It’s my night off.”

Noel Gallagher won’t have many nights off for a while, as he is on tour through July promoting his sophomore album with his band High Flying Birds, Chasing Yesterday. I’m sure he’s got the X factor whenever he’s onstage.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.