After two minutes with Dubin-born Carly Smithson and I am hooked.  She’s older, wiser, more realistic and not as starry-eyed as the other young women on the show.  Afterall, she’s been down this road before.

When she was a 15-year-old Carly Hennessy, she and her father went to California seeking a record deal.  By age 17, she had a recording deal with MCA Records that included production living expenses, a music video, a mall tour, imaging, and radio promotion. MCA expected bigger things than the 17,000 singles and 378 albums that were sold from her debut album “Ultimate High” (now a collector’s item on E-Bay).

In the years that followed, Carly bounced around the country and changed jobs. She tended bar in Atlanta at an Irish pub called Fado while her husband Todd worked at a tattoo shop. She was working there when Michael Johns used to sing on Thursday nights (as Michael Lee).

She and Todd moved to San Diego where she worked as a pub waitress. They eventually opened the Nothing Sacred Tattoo shop. She auditioned for “Idol” in 2005 and didn’t get on. This time around, she made it to the top 10.

During the basdkstage interview, she said that people have often asked if having so many vivid tattoos might have hurt her changes with mainstream American viewers. “I don’t know,” she says. “I will never know. But if that was a reason for someone not voting for me then I don’t want their vote anyway.  This is who I am. I love tattoos.”

She plans on getting more. “I want roses on my chest,” she says, noting that she is having a “hideous cross” removed from her back. “I got it when I was 18 and it was my first,” she says. “No one should get a tattoo until age 25 because at age 18 you don’t know what you want.”

Carly says she’s heard from Ann Wilson of Heart. “She left a message that she’s been watching me on YouTube and she loves what I do with ‘Crazy For You’,” she says.  “I got to met the man who write ‘I Drove All Night’ and he wants a meeting when the tour is over.”

Plans are to head to LA and make a rock album.  She is not in a rush. “I want to take my time and get it right, put my heart and soul in it.”