I didn’t go check out the link – but “Chicago Breaking News” and they said Lee gave an incredibly average rendition of the NA? Wow, so much for the hometown boy, huh?

On this:

sallysimmons:
06/07/2010 at 7:04 am
It just shows how different musical tastes could be. How anyone could hear Lee’s acoustic version of ‘Beautiful Day’ and then say he’s only an average vocalist is beyond me. The smart interpretation of the song, and the emotion that comes through in his vocals just slays me – especially the ten tons of feeling he puts into the line ‘I know I’m not a hopeless case.’ I hear his whole story in that line and that’s always been his strength – that ability is what Simon, and Harry Connick Jr and Usher and tons of others saw in Lee all season long. It’s why he won.

I guess if you don’t look for that in your music, you must completely miss Lee’s appeal and that’s OK. I don’t get the appeal of most Idols.

When I finally listened to his acoustic Beautiful Day, I was struck with how devoid of emotion it sounded to me. Like he’d simply picked a song that a lot of people would know and did something crazy with it to be cool, and then sang it with pretty much no connection to it at all. It seemed more like a study in rearranging a song than anything else. I don’t know if I can really recall ever hearing much of any true emotional connection in his singing, IMO – I know it showed when he sang The Boxer at home but I didn’t even really hear it in his singing. Kiss From a Rose sounded more like he got poked by a thorn and was pissed about it while singing the song. A Little Less Conversation just sounded awful – something close to a dirge. It goes on and on. (That’s Life was about his most successful performance in terms of emotional connection to me, although there was still the list of “a poet, a pauper,” and all of that. Just a list, not really showing emotion in his singing. But that was the ONLY time I heard him on the show that I felt that he REALLY was legit as a singer. Next to that, maybe Simple Man. Big drop off after those two.) You’re right, when you start talking about putting emotion into your singing, it becomes a lot more subjective – which is why you can’t really say that people who don’t feel he connects are wrong. Personally, for me I don’t even need to have words, or be able to understand them, in a vocal performance to feel an emotional connection in someone’s singing. That’s why I can listen to some opera without having a clue of the translation – you don’t need it, because it comes through by way of the singer. Lee could just as easily be singing about going to the store to buy bread as he could be singing about the death of his mother or something and I think the emotional connection would be the same.

For me. Again, this is one of the most subjective things in performance, and I don’t think he really has that going for him much at all. He’s also off the top of my head probably about my 8th or 9th favorite for this season so there’s that. Everyone always thinks their favorites have the greatest emotional connection – it’s part of what makes someone a favorite.