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American Idol Season 7

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marigold:
David A. Blog:

Thursday, November 06, 2008

PERFORMANCE ON JAY LENO TONIGHT!

Heey Everybody.  This week has been the week of band rehearsals, and it's been awesome!  Everyone in the band has been way cool so far, and I've had a lot of fun rehearsing my own songs!  We have performances coming up pretty quick here, with Jay Leno tonight already.  I've been really enjoying it so far, and am looking forward for what's coming up!  It's also getting pretty close to the album release too, which I'm so pumped for.  I can't wait to see what you guys think of it, since I've been spending so much time on it heh.  Anyway, I have things to share with what else has been going on besides the band and rehearsing.  Before things begin to get really hectic and busy, I was able to have some free time and go to Six Flags Magic Mountain!  I love that place.  It's like roller coaster heaven.  I love X2, Tatsu, Goliath, and Riddler's Revenge.  All the roller coasters are pretty good there, actually.  I just don't like when your head bangs side to side on the twisty ones, it gives me a headache.

Another thing I got to do was go to the Jason Mraz concert at the Greek Theater!  We were in the 4th row center and I had such a good time!  Castro came along too, and it's always good to hang with him.  It's great the way Mraz communicates with the crowd.  He's really witty and makes it feel a lot more up-close and personal conversation he's having, despite the fact that there are thousands of people there.  I loved when he did Only Human, The Remedy, Life Is Beautiful, No Stopping Us, and I'm Yours (of course.. ha...)  Honestly I loved all of them.  Maybe I'm a little biased.... but I'm pretty sure all of the songs were just amazing.  He did Oh Happy Day too!  And that was sooo cool.  K, I'm done with that now.  We got the chance to talk to him for a little bit, even though he was getting MOBBED.  It was really neat to see how friendly and laid back he was in person.  You never know how people are going to be when you meet them, since they're usually getting dragged all over the place and under a lot of stress.  He kept his cool the entire time though, and I'm sure he's been doing this for a while now.  I had tickets for when he came to Utah on October 28th, but I had to do promotion stuff and couldn't go :(.  So I'm really glad I was able to go last Saturday!  All rightyyyy... That's enough of talking about that.  If you haven't gotten his new CD yet... you should really check it out :)

The last thing I'd like to talk about is something I did at the Universal City Walk.  It's this thing called iFly, and oh my heck!  It's roocks!  You get to fly in a tube!  I have a couple of pictures that I'll put up.  I was a little nervous at first, but it's not even scary when you get in there.  I kinda slobbered over myself, but that's ok because it was totally worth it.  I can't really explain how it was because it was... just a really different experience.  I guess it was kinda being like a bird or something... you just don't move around a whole lot and you're inside a tube.  I guess I got a DVD of it... but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to show that haha.  Anyway I've written quite a bit in this one, so I'll try to get back later.  5 Days until the CD comes out!

P.S. I know I talked a ton about Jason Mraz, but I think that only makes it even more appropriate to share one of his songs today.  So the song for today is A Beautiful Mess - Jason Mraz.  It's amaaazing when he does it live too!

marigold:
An interesting article:

David Cook: 'I Just Think This Record Is Me'

The ''American Idol'' season 7 winner talks about his upcoming self-titled debut album, comparisons to runner-up David Archuleta and fourth-place season 5 finalist Chris Daughtry, and handling post-''Idol'' fame

It's after midnight, but the shoot for David Cook's first music video, ''Light On,'' is just beginning in the middle of a football field at Los Angeles' Valley College. Director Wayne Isham is bragging on Cook's personality to his cameraman and other assembled crew members. ''I loved meeting you yesterday,'' gushes Isham, who has worked with many of the biggest names in the business over the last 20 years, ''because you're the nicest guy.'' Cook demurs upon hearing that praise, telling everyone, ''Give me 15 minutes and I'm gonna be the biggest a--hole you ever met.''

The man doth protest too much...and too politely, we might add. Over the course of a nearly seven-hour shoot, wearing a T-shirt in unexpectedly chilly weather, Cook proves unflappably affable, all promises of diva fits to the contrary. But do nice guys always finish first? They might on American Idol, as Cook did in winning this past season, but it remains to be seen how the singer will fare in the rock & roll musical realm he's reentering with his first major-label album, David Cook, which hits stores Nov. 18.

A couple of weeks after the video shoot, we caught some chat time with Cook, and true to form, the singer is proving quite sanguine under pressure, as you'll see in the conversation that follows.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you ever go online and sample the insane, intense fan scrutiny there?
DAVID COOK: ''There is this one video on YouTube that I've gotten into a habit of...well, not a habit, but I've [watched] it a couple of times. It's these early-teen girls watching the finale, and they filmed themselves, and they're all Archuleta fans, which is fun. My name gets announced [as the winner], and the girls just lose it. It's painful to watch in that sense, because obviously I don't want to feel like I'm upsetting anybody. But these girls said something that's so funny, to me: ''How could they vote for that guy? He doesn't even shave!'' I love that. Because to me that encapsulated everything about people getting into the show. They embraced the littlest things about each person. I find that so interesting, from a sociological level. The things that some people gravitate toward me for are the things that other people just shun. You've got to take it with a grain of salt. But I love that everybody cares enough to have an opinion. Loved, hated, but never ignored, I guess is how I look at it.

Sometimes you can read the partisan fan squabbles that are still happening online and wonder if 20 years from now people will still be battling out the Cook-versus-Archie dynamic.
Hopefully, because that means Archie and I are hopefully still doing well! In a sense, it's fun that that whole rivalry thing got created. If you put me in the same sentence with David Archuleta, I'll be fine.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: On the show's next-to-last night, in that famous moment when Simon didn't like the Collective Soul song you chose, some people wondered, since you had been set up as a favorite, is Simon deliberately doing this to set up a backlash against himself, so it won't seem like such an easy win for you? On the other hand, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and it's possible that Simon Cowell really just doesn't like Collective Soul.
DAVID COOK: When Simon said that about Collective Soul, and said, ''You should have sung 'Billie Jean' again or something,'' it was a rare moment where I felt justified to try to defend myself, just from the stance that I'd already done it, and I didn't want to do it again. I guess the way I looked at it was, I'd rather fall flat on my face on my own terms. The fact that people responded the way they did is amazing. The [winning by] 12 million votes thing still throws me. I even conceded defeat that night to Archie. I thought he'd done amazingly. I stood on the stage and watched all three of his songs and was in awe. For a kid his age to do what he's done, my hat's off to the kid.

I was trying to analyze why even I got unexpectedly caught up in that moment. It was like, ''Yeah! Stick it to the man with your Collective Soul ballad!'' Then you step back and think, well, that's not the most rebellious thing, like doing a punk song or something.
Right, exactly.

But in the context of what was happening, it was a more subtle song than you might have picked, and that in itself could be considered a slightly rebellious act.
That song to me probably has the biggest backstory of any song I did on the show. Because I had that song in my head early, and I kept working on it, and it never felt like it was ready, so I would go with other songs. We got to the finale and I had the option to do it, and I was like, ''Man, I've just gotta do it, because if I don't do it now, I'm gonna regret it the rest of my life.'' First off, I love Collective Soul, and I think it's a great song. It seemed like a fitting way to end my run as a competitor in that show. I knew if I could pull it off the way it was in my head, that win or lose, I was cool with that. And it came off really well. That's actually one of the two performances that I watched back after the finale. I watched that one and I watched my week 1 performance of ''Happy Together'' by the Turtles, just to see the absurd transition. It was night and day, man. I changed more during the four and a half months on that show than I changed the 25 years prior.

Your very first album, which you recorded and released independently, sold a few hundred units online during Idol before it was pulled from distribution. And, of course, it's been pirated online. But the actual CD must be a real collectors' item.
Yeah, it's crazy. My mom pointed it out to me. A copy of it sold for two grand on eBay. That's about a grand more than I paid to make it.

And you were working on a second indie album when you went into Idol? What happened with that?
I had completed a second one. Neal [Tiemann], my guitar player, produced it. That very first album was intended to be by the band I was in, and by a series of events, I just ended up putting that out solo. But I started working on the second one with more of a clear [solo] intention in mind. By the time I made it on the show, I had these 12 or 13 songs recorded that have never seen the light of day, other than in the live shows.

Making your first major-label album must have seemed like the best and worst of worlds, in a way. As with every Idol winner's album, a great deal of it is being recorded while you're not there, because you have to be out on the road with the Idol tour. Did you resent having to go on tour, thinking, ''I should be writing and recording right now''?
I only hated having to change mindsets. I enjoyed touring and I enjoyed recording, and I hated having to rewire my brain between the two. That was tough....But it helped that [producer] Rob Cavallo and I really hit it off. And I was able to bring my guitar player aboard early. Neal has an idea where my head is at musically, so it was nice to have somebody in the studio, when I wasn't there, who spoke for me and spoke accurately....I'm still kind of in awe of it. To do what we did in this amount of time is no small feat. We essentially put a year's worth of work into three months.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let's talk about a few of the new songs, starting with the single ''Light On,'' one of only two songs you didn't co-write.
DAVID COOK: ''Light On'' is an interesting song. It encompasses almost all of my range. It's all over the place. That's Chris Cornell at his finest. It's got some Zeppelin influence in it; it's got some '80s hair-metal influence; it's got some grunge influence. To me it's like a rock history lesson put into about a four-minute lecture. It's fun to play, but it is definitely an intimidating song.

The heaviest song on the album, by far, is ''Bar Ba Sol.'' It's got some almost some metal chords.
I'm a big fan of this band Injected out of Atlanta. We called them up and said, can we have a run at this song and see what happens? What they sent us was a demo version, so we took the idea and ran with it. It's heavy, but still a strong melody.

Was the title of ''Mr. Sensitive'' meant to be ironic in any way?
The song was unintentionally ironic. I had the harmonic riff in my head for five months. In my lyric journal, I had ''Mr. Sincere'' written down, and sincere turned into sensitive. I wanted to write about something outside myself and get a little metaphorical. He lives in a village devoid of feeling. They get so afraid of this child who has feelings that they kill him. It kind of took on this Tim Burton-like, twisted vision of James and the Giant Peach for me. But I know people look at me as that sensitive guy.

And ''A Daily AntheM'' has to do with your brother [Adam, who is fighting cancer], who people learned about from watching Idol, right?
''A Daily AntheM'' is three years old. I didn't originally write it with the intention of it being about Adam. I just wanted to write something that had a John Lennon, ''War is Over'' quality. Then I was like, oh s---, if you capitalize that letter and that letter and that letter, you've capitalized my brother's name.

You fit in with a style of rock singing that's popular right now. There's the singers from Hinder and Nickelback, guys who have a broad range, but not the real clean, Steve Perry-type of singing that was popular in the mainstream in the '80s. The guys who can sing but have more smoke or rasp in the voice seem to be favored now.
Dumb luck, man. Singing in smoky clubs for 10 years will give you a little bit of a rasp, for sure. When I first started playing in bands, I played it safe and I stayed in my midrange and all that. As I got more into it, I realized I could do more things with my voice. That's the kind of thing that's fun for me. I love having the vocal capacities to do something like that, because I realize that it's a gift and not everybody has it.

Everyone will be making the comparison you're sick of: Is he gonna have a Daughtry-like career?
Opinions and perceptions, man — I didn't let it get to me on the show, and I see no reason to let it get to me afterward. I just think this record is me, and if people want to compare it to Daughtry, awesome. He's sold a ton of records. I just hope someday the coin will flip and somebody will compare somebody else to me.

It must be hard to have perspective on what really happened with the show, even this far out from it now.
It's strange. I don't feel inherently that there's a justification for it. I realize that a lot of people watch the show, and I get the idea of the celebrity aspect of it, I guess. But I still feel like that awkward musician; I think I always will. That's a huge component of me staying kind of humbled and grounded about the whole thing: I get the flimsiness of it. I get that it could all go away. I mean, fame is fleeting....But I'm at peace. I've got guys that I'm playing with that I love to death, and I'm playing music that I think we all really get into, and as long as we've got that and a place to play, I'm good.

Link: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20007164_20171835_20238699,00.html

marigold:
An interesting article:

David Archuleta On Dating & His Debut Album
 
David Archuleta is thankful for his success – so much so that in the liner notes of his self-titled debut album, due this Tuesday, he said he thanked the entire state of Utah.

“I got carried away,” he told Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush in an interview for “The Billy Bush Show.” “There are a lot of people to thank.”

Fans may soon be thanking the “American Idol” Season 7 runner-up for his album, on which he told Billy there’s “at least one song” for everyone.

“We experimented on this album and that way I didn’t get stuck in a niche,” he said. “I wanted to make sure there was a variety.”

Among his favorite songs on the album is a cover of Robbie Williams’ “Angels.”

“I think it’s one of the greatest songs ever written,” he said. “It’s such a powerful song.”

And though the young star has his “Arch Angel” fans, he said there’s no girlfriend waiting in the wings – yet.

“I’m not in a relationship,” he admitted, noting it’s hard to find time on the road to get to know someone.

“I’m not really a flirty person,” he said. “I think it’s all about feeling comfortable around someone … and being able to hang out and be goofy with them.”

For now, he’s hoping that people get comfortable with his album – but he’ll understand if they don’t.

“People are going to have their critiques and… I’m open to that,” he said.

Link: http://www.accesshollywood.com/david-archuleta-on-dating-and-his-debut-album_article_12089

marigold:
More on David A:

'Idol' runner-up David Archuleta is poised for record debut

Those who followed David Archuleta's rise on American Idol won't be surprised that the Season 7 runner-up is a little nervous about his self-titled first album, out Tuesday.

"I haven't had a ton of recording experience," the 17-year-old singer says. "Sometimes I feel like, 'Wow, I don't know anything at all.' "

Archuleta's naive, somewhat fragile persona helped endear him to Idol viewers, even if he was bested by the edgier, older David Cook. But discussing his debut, Archuleta is savvy enough to emphasize that he worked under certain restrictions, even as he expresses gratitude.

"We didn't have a lot of time," Archuleta says. "People were expecting it to come out before we got started. But it was humbling to work with these producers and writers who have had such success."

Those collaborators include Andreas Carlsson, Desmond Child and new Idol judge Kara DioGuardi, as well as 'N Sync alum JC Chasez, who was taken by Archuleta's "strong grasp of his identity. He was always intelligent and professional. I think the world of the kid."

Blender editor in chief Joe Levy points out that Archuleta is "both young and poised, innocent and capable. Those are good combinations."

And, as the Jonas Brothers and others have proven, potentially lucrative ones. "When you sell records made by teenagers to teenagers, you can sell a lot of music. David has shown himself to be a people-pleaser."

Not that the tender star has avoided controversy. There was the flap surrounding his father and manager, Jeff Archuleta, who was banned backstage in Idol's waning weeks.

"That was rough," the younger Archuleta says. The uproar was "rude and weird, because my dad is so laid-back. There are still people who think he's abusing me or something. I don't think they realize I'm almost 18."

Archuleta's more ardent fans recognize his youth, but in a more "respectful" way. When he performed on the Idols Live tour, "there wasn't any underwear thrown on the stage, though that happened to some of the other kids." At least not until the final show, when his former rival and buddy Cook lobbed panties at him, Archuleta says, giggling.

Fame hasn't had a profound impact on Archuleta's love life, either. "I've gone on dates, but nothing serious," says the devout Mormon. "If you rush into going steady, you don't meet other people.

"It's like, you may think this one ice cream place is the best in the world, but then you try Graeter's or Cold Stone, and you think, 'My God, what have I been missing?' "

Link: http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2008-11-06-david-archuleta-debut_N.htm?csp=34

marigold:
The Ellen DeGeneres Show

Friday November 14, 2008

“American Idol” runner-up DAVID ARCHULETA

DAVID ARCHULETA: It takes a lot to ‘wow’ Simon Cowell, but David did just that. He was the runner-up to another David on “American Idol” last season, but he could just as easily have been crowned the winner. (I’ll just call him “Archie” to avoid confusion.) And he sounds like he’s been singing for 20 years... though he’s not even 18 ‘til next month! David will perform his single “Crush” from his self-titled debut CD!

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