A review of the Idol concert

I ran across this tonight. It was linked to from Boston.com, posted by Joanna Weiss. Great Stuff about David!


Wuz Robbed: Michael Johns. Did he really only finish eighth? Those who view the tour as a chance to see what the singers will do as artists probably disagree with me, but Michael Johns was one of the highlights of the show. He was one of the very few performers who really knew how to work the arena; he chose songs that the crowd was excited to hear; and he sang them well -- including the big Steven Tyler notes at the end of "Dream On" that were lopped off from his TV performance. Johns also gets the notion of patter, bless his heart -- unlike most of his fellow performers, who swallowed most of whatever they were trying to say between songs, Johns was comfortable and entertaining on stage. While Johns did get a nice showy bit during the AI Gives Back group sing, I wish there had been room in this format for a reprise of the fantastic bluesy Johns/Smithson "The Letter" from the season finale.

And then there were Davids. Walking around before the show, you couldn't take three steps without tripping over some 8-12 year old girl wearing either a tour shirt from the night before or a hand-made t-shirt saying something like "U Rock D. Cook!!!!!" And when the smoke machine got cranked up after Syesha introduced YDA (he's the only person who got to use the smoke machine - wonder if it's in his contract?), the screeches from that 8-12 crowd were positively deafening. Pre-teen girls can shriek at a pitch that no other segment of the human population can achieve. Ow.

So anyway, YDA got the full piano-ascending-from-the-depths treatment plus bonus smoke machine, and when the smoke cleared and the music started, guess what? Yep, he's still got those dead, dead eyes. Not that this bothered the the Nassau County elementary school crowd, which was going positively apeshit by the time YDA got to his third song ("Stand By Me," which even I must admit he sang really well). Somewhere in the middle of YDA's set, Mr. Cosmo poked me and said "hey, look at all the screens." From our vantage point way up in the nosebleeds, we had a great view of the hundreds of people filming the performance from their cell phones and digital cameras -- the glow of all of those LCD screens in the darkness is apparently the lighter for a new millennium of concertgoers.

Now doesn't this seem like an awfully long post without any mention of David Cook? That's because it was an awfully long stretch of time between Chikezie's opening number a couple of hours earlier and the moment at which David Cook finally appeared on the stage. (Which was the core ridiculousness of this format -- fortunately, the fact that Michael Johns and Carly Smithson got booted relatively early saved the first act from a serious case of the monotonies.) But I wanted to come to this concert solely because David Cook proved that all was right with the universe when he triumphed over YDA and his dead, dead eyes, and the fact that it took two hours to get the guy on stage is the most serious flaw of this production. (A lesser flaw was the fact that when he finally did get onto the stage, it was clear that the makeup artist had gone a little heavy on the eyeliner --or else the makeup had been applied back when Kristy Lee was working her Stand Up! choreography and then he'd taken an extended nap without reapplying his makeup upon awakening.)

The performance, though? Really, really good. I can (and just did!) nit-pick with the best of them, but there is a core sincerity and joy to David Cook that makes him a pleasure to watch. Unlike, say, a YDA, who has spent his short life being groomed to perform with a cadre of Mousekedancers behind him, Cook comes across like someone who never thought anything like this could possibly happen to him and who is grateful for every moment of it. Not to mention the fact that the guy can sing his *** off. Mr. Cosmo and I have often discussed the fact that AI winners seem to develop a certain star quality after winning the show (see, e.g., Carrie Underwood, and that incredible performance of "Last Name" last season on the show), and Cook is no exception. Taken as a whole, the show felt like a David Cook concert (which, incidentally, included the non-truncated versions of both "Hello" and "Billie Jean") with nine opening acts.

I know we like to be snarky around here, but let me just say this: for the first time in seven seasons, I have cared about who won American Idol, and so I feel comfortable being a little bit gushy about the fact that I am happy to have seen David Cook perform on stage as a part of this tour. America totally got this one right.

preorder the album

I want to pre-order David's album that will be coming out later this year but when I go to amazon.com, it says something about pre-ordering the album that features The Time of My Life. I think that's just wrong. I'm afraid to pre-order it because I'm not convinced that is the right album. It's weird. He already released that song and I doubt it will be on the new album.