American Idol winner, Caleb Johnson, sat down with Lyndsey Parker of Yahoo music for an interview and performance a few days before the Idols hit the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.
I’m going to transcribe this for posterity! Caleb goes on record to say that his debut album, Testify, which dropped earlier this week, is all him.
“I got to run rampant and really wild with the process, and really just put myself in everything,” Caleb told Yahoo. “There’s this kind of, like, bad rap or mythology about Idol, where it’s like, ‘[The winners] don’t have control,’ blah blah blah, but I can attest I had 110 percent involvement and in every single aspect of the record. There was no ‘powers-that-be’ that was pulling the strings saying, ‘Oh, you need to do this,’ or whatever. It was me.”
He also talks about what the songwriting process was like as he and his team cranked out an album within only a few weeks. It was a very hectic and creative process. Working with pro songwriters really taught him a lot.
Caleb stuck with his earlier assertion that he’s the first “real rocker” to win Idol. When Lyndsey suggested that season 7 winner, David Cook, rocked pretty hard, Caleb said. “David Cook…he’s like pop rock. He never really did stuff like Zeppelin or Rush. He was more so. like…Alternative? Or pop rock stuff.”
Check out the full interview below. See more at Yahoo Music
Interview
Caleb also performed a few acoustic songs in the Yahoo studio. Check out the first single from Testify, “Only One.”
“Save Me”
Here’s the song he debuted on the American Idol Live tour, “Fighting Gravity”
