17 Years Later, David Cook Reflects on Winning ‘American Idol’ (Exclusive)

In 2008, American Idol named David Cook as its winner.

Now, 17 years later, Cook talks exclusively with PEOPLE about his time on the show, who he still keeps in touch with and what he’s been up to since winning his first record deal.

“My time on Idol was worthwhile and fruitful. I got a career out of it,” he says. “It was extremely exciting, and all of it was very new.”

Cook, 42, admits that he didn’t “religiously watch every episode of the show” before he was on it.

“My knowledge of the show was remedial at best, and I think coming in completely unaware of what I was walking into made everything pretty exciting and new,” he explains.

Despite not knowing exactly what he was going into, the then-25-year-old won season 7 of the hit singing competition, with David Archuleta as the runner-up. The season also featured Carly Smithson, Brooke White, Syesha Mercado, Ramiele Malubay, Jason Castro and more.

While fans saw the finished product every week, Cook notes that the days behind the scenes were grueling. He says they had “anywhere from like 16 to 20 hour days, most every day of the week.” However, viewers only saw about an hour of that work when the show aired. 

Due to the long hours, Cook says the contestants all got very close.

“To go through an experience like that, which is such a unique thing to go through, to share that experience with this small group of people all heading in the same direction, it’s impossible not to develop relationships off that,” he shares. “I’ve been really fortunate to be able to maintain some of those relationships.”

“I still talk to Arch every now and again. Not enough, but every now and again,” he admits. “I just talked to Carly Smithson not too long ago. Talked to Ramiele here and there, talked to Brooke. We had a good group. I think it’d be impossible to walk away from that and not have some new friends.” 

“It’s a unique fraternity to be a part of and something I’m really proud to be a part of,” he adds. “I don’t believe that there’s anything else like going through American Idol. To be a part of that particular group is pretty rad.” 

In addition to the other contestants, Cook shares that he built good relationships with those who worked behind the scenes on the show as well.

“I remember [when I made] the top five, jokingly saying, ‘Hey, if I somehow win, I want somebody to take me down to like the basement of the studios where I was taping, and I wanna spin The Price Is Right wheel.’ That’s all I wanted to do,” he recalls.

True to their word, after the finale, some of the crew members took Cook over to the Price Is Right stage.

“We were back over there at the studios packing stuff up, and they took me down to spin the wheel,” he says. “I landed on a dollar, oddly enough. That was maybe the luckiest day of my life.” 

Since being on American Idol, Cook says he has “lived quite a bit of life in the last 17 years,” such as marrying wife Racheal Stump in 2015, starring in Kinky Boots on Broadway and releasing four studio albums.

“I’ve gotten to travel the world playing music and meet some incredible people, and see some incredible places. I would hope that those various experiences have found their way into my songwriting,” he says.

“I feel like the stuff I’m doing now is more of a complete synopsis of me. Coming off the show, it’s definitely easy to throw some blinders on and focus on moving forward and getting through it. So to feel a little bit more whole and complete now is awesome.”

With more life experience, he has more to pull from when he’s writing his songs. Recently, he put out a three-song EP called The Hero. Cook says it will be part of a set of three EPs, and shares that he just finished tracking the second one. 

“Then once those three EPs are out, I’ve got a plan to get a full-length record out and then go anywhere and everywhere that I can play those songs at,” he says.

With nearly two decades of experience under his belt, Cook says he feels like he can “allow more of my personality to come through on stage now.” While he used to try to distance himself from his earlier success, he now makes it a point to always “play the hits.”

“‘Time of My Life,’ ‘Come Back to Me,’ ‘Light On’ are always in rotation,” he says. “I definitely fought against playing ‘Time of My Life’ for a while because it just felt like a moment. We try to play the songs that people came to hear.” 

“I’ve got a very good relationship with my fans and they definitely communicate, which is great,” he adds. “That’s one of the things that makes this fun for me, is that we try really hard to make our shows unique to each individual evening. Whether that means how we’re interacting with the audience, whether that means what songs we’re playing. So having an audience that isn’t shy about letting us know what they want to hear, that makes our job a little easier.”