Jordin Sparks remains in contact with the top 10 contestants from her American Idol season.
In an interview with PEOPLE, Sparks spoke about staying connected with performers from her season.
“It’s so crazy to hear that my journey as an adult now. My journey is older than I was when I won, which is really insane to say,” Sparks said. “It feels like yesterday, [like] it just happened. But the duality of it is that it also feels like it was ages ago, like it was way longer than 18 years. I feel like I’ve lived a ton of life in these last 18 years, and I’m so grateful.”
Sparks shared that she had a “great experience” on the show.
“All these years later, I’m still just so grateful,” she says. “And I also am — not that I can’t believe it, but it’s still really amazing to see that American Idol is still going strong. It’s just incredible.”
Sparks is now mom to son DJ, 7, with husband Dana Isaiah. She still keeps up with her castmates.
“We all still talk to each other, ‘Happy Birthday,’ or, ‘This is my new project,’ or, ‘Here’s my kids,’” Sparks said. “Different things like that. So we keep up.”
Sparks says that the group reunited to celebrate Melinda Doolittle’s birthday.
“Melinda, my beautiful, loving Melinda, she just celebrated a birthday. So we were all making sure that we told her about that. But it’s really cool to be able to keep in touch with them,” Sparks recalled. “I feel like I can’t speak for other seasons, but for my season we really all got very close, and I don’t know what I would’ve done without all of them.”
“Nobody knows except for other contestants that have been on,” she says. “It’s almost like an alumni group. You just see each other and you have this understanding like, ‘Yeah, we went through that.’”
Sparks also launched her new podcast, “What’s Your Spark?”
“I hope people become a little bit more curious about the world around them, whether it’s nature or people or even themselves,” she said. “I just hope that they get a little bit more curious about other things and other subjects or other people. Nowadays sometimes we try to be like, okay, you find people who are like-minded and that’s it and you kind of just stick with that.”