A little news for your holiday
The summer tour starts July 5 in Manchester NH and is shaping up to be a huge hit. In New England, for instance, both the Manchester NH and Worcester MA shows sold out in a day. Each city quickly added a show and those sold out as well! According to this NYPost article, the tour, which now has about 60 dates scheduled, is expected to offer some real competition to the summer tours of big stars like Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, and Tim McGraw. Thanks bookwomanblue
This critic from Slate Magazine, thinks that Idol is getting better and better, and is actually good for popular music.
“Today, most of those critics have quieted down, and not just because they’ve succumbed to Idol‘s goofy charms, such as Simon Cowell’s baffling critical Esperanto (“Katharine, that performance was almost a moment”) or the spectacle of Paula Abdul’s slow descent into madness. The fact is, season by season, song by song, the show has gotten better. Five years after its launch there’s little doubt: The music on American Idol is often very good, and American Idol is good for popular music.”
The producers have worked hard in the last two years to make American Idol more than just a glorified karaoke contest–their efforts are paying off.
Elvis.com has put up more photos from the kids visit to Graceland Top 4 week. thanks to Gray Charles
A couple of interesting tidbits can be found in this E! online post finale story. Apparently Meatloaf, who sang with Katharine McPhee for a finale number, has such bad stage fright, that he doesn’t remember performing at all Wednesday night. Afterward he “cried like a baby.” Also, Randy Jackson will be Mariah Carey’s music director for her upcoming summer tour. Thanks JW
American Idol broke most of it’s own records this year, including the number of text votes they received. According to Cingular Wireless they “recorded more than 64.5 million text messages throughout the show’s season, breaking last year’s record of 41.5 million text messages. Text messages include votes, trivia, sweepstakes entries, TXT chats, fan club and vote number reminder.” Thanks Tinak.
Mea Culpa
I think I owe Taylor Hicks an apology. In my re-cap of his Tuesday night performance of “Do I Make You Proud”, I said that he missed the note when the key changed. Many readers more musical than I insisted that he in fact NAILED the note. In this critique, by Rosanne Simunovic, Conductor of the Timmins Youth Singers she affirms that his “segue into the key change was pitch perfect and vocally astounding.” I was wrong. I think I’ll go clean the wax out of my ears now. Thank you.
By the way, I never linked to Simunovic’s vocal master classes of the Idol performances, but they really are an interesting read. She been doing vocal critiques for American Idol since Season Two. And she critiques Canadian Idol as well.
Canadian Idol
Speaking of Canadian Idol–it premiers tonight. I’ll probably catch some episodes via downloaded torrents, like I did last year.
