SINGAPORE – Fans may be upset that Nathan Hartono lost the title of Sing! China champion on Friday night (Oct 7) to fellow finalist Jiang Dunhao, but the Singaporean singer says he was pleased with the performance he gave on the show.

Well, mostly.

“Could I have done better? Yeah of course, it’s music! I am never fully satisfied,” Hartono told TODAY over the phone early Saturday morning (Oct 8), adding that he was very happy for Jiang, for whom he has a lot of respect. “Also I am kind of annoyed, like really pissed, that I missed out on a few lyrics there at the end there, the last song. Because that was the one I was practising so much for, because I knew the lyrics were a bit of a struggle for me. They were slightly more poetic and very deep lyrics, so I was really drilling that song crazy all week.”

The Singaporean singer was declared first runner-up in the finals of the wildly popular Chinese reality singing competition, which was held at Beijing National Stadium and broadcast live on Zhejiang TV.

He performed a remixed version of the rap song Nunchucks in a duet with mentor Jay Chou as well as Chou’s The Longest Movie in the first half of the competition. He then sang Moonlight In The City, originally by Singaporean singer Mavis Hee, and Hong Kong pop icon Anita Mui’s Women Of Flowers, after he and Jiang were selected to face-off in the second half.

Jiang, who is from Xinjiang and on Chinese rock singer Wang Feng’s team, eventually won the title with 47 votes from a panel of music professionals, as well as 59,852 votes from members of the audience. Hartono finished with 45 and 45,613 votes respectively.

“Thanks to just a million factors that I can’t even name, you’re on a stage that big so many things going on in your head. I had a brain fart and I missed out the last line,” Hartono said. “I am not super happy with that, but other than that I think I took on every challenge that each song brought and I am happy with the show.”

The 25-year-old also said he didn’t view the results as a loss, and that he was still experiencing an “outpouring of gratefulness” for the opportunity to get this far into the competition.

“Tonight was not a competition for me. I did not see it as a competition,” he said. “We are just all in it to give a good show to the people, to the paying audience, to the audience at the Beijing National Stadium, to the people at home. Our goal was to give a good show to everybody. Regardless of the result, you know, who cares. It’s a music competition. Music is not a quantifiable thing. You can’t really say in binary forms what is good, what is bad, what is better.”

Hartono added that he knows “life is going to change quite a bit” after the competition, and that he was gearing up for new challenges in his career. In the meantime though, after spending several hectic months abroad, he is looking forward to coming home to Singapore to be with his friends and family, sleep in his own bed and walk his dog.

“I just hope people see in this that it’s not so much about win or lose, it’s about trying, about taking the leap, and making sure you do your best, and tackle things that terrify you, because it could change your life. It certainly changed mine," he said.