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Thanks to lil’sparrow over on DC.org for bringing this lovely to my attention!

Orson Scott Card is a well known sci-fi writer, he had this lovely blog entry about Season 7 on AI. I’ll forgive him for not ‘getting’ Analog Heart – he is old afterall….LOL! (Sorry Orson!)

You can check out our growing Season 7 AI photo gallery HERE, our galleries for Brook White and Amanda Overmyer HERE and our David Cook & Michael Johns galleries HERE!

Orson Scott Card Muses over the 2 Davids & Season 7 Idol Stars

The American Idol finale — the results show — was one of the best variety shows I’ve ever watched. They did a stunning job of bringing us great performers and pairing them with contestants. It was a delight to see David Cook strutting with ZZ Top — an inspired choice — and I wish I had a recording of that version of “Sharp-Dressed Man.”

Sitting Brooke White down with Graham Nash was a perfect choice. People today seem to have forgotten that at the beginning of the 70s, Crosby, Still, and Nash (with Neil Young added in from time to time) were the monster band. It was the great day of the singer-songwriter, and Brooke White’s voice was designed to rekindle the flame of that movement.

We also got a chance to see what the tour performances would look like — though they included David Hernandez and Amanda Overmeyer, who as the twelfth- and eleventh-place finishers will not be on the top-ten tour.

I’ve been listening to recordings of the American Idol performances in the week since the final results were announced. It’s amazing how quickly my affection for particular performers fades enough that I no longer forgive flaws and weaknesses in the performances.

Now I’m annoyed by Amanda’s inability to find and hold a pitch — when watching her sing, I didn’t care because her performances were so passionate. Still — I’d happily pay to see her perform her kind of music. It would be ludicrous if she were on the tour having to try to sing

Michael Johns has a quaver that only toward the end of his stay on the show did he begin to control. But his tracks are still listenable.

Stage fright transformed Brooke White’s live performances into parodies of what she did on the studio recordings — which is why she wasn’t in the finale. However, I’m looking forward to this wonderful voice on many albums in the future, because her studio recordings absolutely hold up.

Kristy Lee Cook always looked just a little out of her depth — but in her recordings, I find she holds up very well, especially her later songs. I think she’ll have a terrific career in country music.

Jason Castro’s hyper-mellow performances actually distracted from what he was doing with his voice. Recorded, he is absolutely wonderful.

The fact that it’s a visual performance is actually one of the weaknesses of the show. As with Star Search before it, American Idol emphasizes a certain kind of singing precisely because it plays so well on television — the passionate, full-voice shouting match.

This year, however, it was not all about big voices. The decision to let the performers use instruments to accompany themselves was long overdue. Put Brooke White at a piano or give David Cook a guitar, and they were in hog heaven.

Putting the band onstage for some numbers really worked for Syesha Mercado — she was at her best when she had someone else to relate to. All in all, this year was the friendliest to performers who are more comfortable with the intimacy of the studio or the small house than in big arenas — and, when you think about it, that’s the decisive element in a recording career.

After all, David Cook was not pleasant to look at when he first arrived on the program. It took a while for him to find the right way to deal with his hair, the right amount of facial hair, and the right costuming to fit the way he sang. It was a great help in our ability to hear his voice and understand what he was actually doing with his music.

Which brings me to David Archuleta. This young man has an amazing vocal instrument, and his smile is so real, so infectious that almost everyone loved him instantly. But he’s also young, and so far, he hasn’t actually discovered what his own voice is.

All his licks, all his decorations of the melody, are actually standard pop-music stuff. Behind those decorations is a rich tone and an earnestness, an understanding of the songs that would still be there if he dropped the decorations entirely. Which I wish he would do!

Why? Because he had to share a stage with David Cook and the differences showed. The judges often talked about “making a song your own” and “being memorable,” but there are two ways of doing that.

David Archuleta made every song fundamentally the same. It was his style — but all the obvious elements of that style were from the standard pop sound. This was never clearer than in his duet with One Republic. He needed to adapt in order to sound good with this singer — and he couldn’t. He could only do that pop sound.

If he had been covering the song alone, Archuleta’s version would have been terrific — a different take on the music. But singing it with the original performer, he needed to adapt his style, to work with his partner, and he didn’t know how to do it. Those pop licks are, so far, a crutch that Archuleta hasn’t learned to let go of.

David Cook, on the other hand, had no crutches. He could strip his voice of all affectation and sing “Music of the Night” exactly as written — pure voice. Even when he used pop licks (as on “Eleanor Rigby”) he still kept it fairly minimal and sang the song.

Where David Archuleta decorated almost every sustained note, David Cook would find one or two moments where he could change a note so that we felt a powerful surprise that was nevertheless quite satisfying. Archuleta did the same things to every song; David Cook found the secrets inside the songs and exposed them to us in a way that was different every time. Think of those final notes in “Music of the Night,” or the unforgettable “Little Sparrow.”

Yet even when Cook is at his simplest, his voice is instantly recognizable. He sounds as if he has been through all the trouble in the world. He sounds wise. Which is, of course, absurd when you consider how young he is. And how nice he is, by all reports. But that’s the quality he brings to his performances, and it is transcendent.

David Archuleta will grow as he gets older. While he will never read or care about my advice, I’m going to give it anyway: What you already do, you have mastered. To grow, you must do something different. And the first step is to do song after song in which you never decorate a note. You just sing it straight, note for note, as written. This is not a permanent change, but it’s important that it be an extended exercise — that you do it for months. Why? Because that’s the only way you’ll start to find new ways to freshen and own the songs.

Here’s why this matters: It’s fine to decorate familiar songs. But when you do all those vocal pyrotechnics, it stops mattering what the actual song is. We found that when Mariah Carey was the “mentor” on the show. Her music exists only to be decorated. Time after time, there was no song there.

Which should have been a complete killer for David Cook, by the way. Yet he took a song that is, lyrically and musically, as shallow as can be — “Always Be My Baby” — and, by simplifying it, stripping it, he showed us there were some bones and meat in the thing after all.

Of course, Archuleta can sell a lot of records doing exactly what he does right now. But time will change things. He will go out of fashion; then he will do what Donny Osmond and Ricky Nelson and other young pop singers had to do: He will find out what his grownup voice is.

Meanwhile, David Cook is, quite simply, the best singer American Idol ever produced. He is, right now, already so good that I would like to hear him cover every song that I ever liked, because I think he’d bring something new to it. I mean, I want to hear the David Cook version of the Cat Stevens catalog “Wild World,” “Tea for the Tillerman”), the Stephen Sondheim songbook (“Being Alive,” “Pretty Women”), everything Carole King wrote that a man can possibly sing, Chico Buarque’s “Traffico,” Paul Simon’s “Homeless” and “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis,” Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” Martin Page’s “House of Stone and Light,” and I can imagine amazingly insightful performances of seeming fluff like “Up, Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon,” “Muskrat Love” — even the appalling “Feelin’ Groovy” could have a wonderful David Cook version. He could do it slow, making it ironic and sad; he could do it as a pounding rock anthem. It would work — if David Cook was singing it.

Meanwhile, though, I know for a fact that there are songwriters out there yearning to have David Cook be the first singer of their best new songs. Because his performance will show the real song, not hide it behind production and decoration.

Proof of this is Cook’s pre-Idol cd, Analog Heart. It’s a noisy-band rocker — he has had much better arrangements on Idol. But the voice is there, with songs I’ve never heard before, which he sings with such clarity that I understand every word, and everything behind those words. He can introduce a new song and make it work. (And I forgive him for the ear-destroying final instrumental note on “Let Go.” Barely.)

But he has changed on Idol. Working with the arrangers and musicians on the show has greatly broadened him and he has responded by stretching his voice into different avenues. Analog Heart is a very good album, but his post-Idol albums should be better.

Don’t think that I’m dissing Archuleta and telling you why Cook needed to win. I honestly didn’t care who won and didn’t vote during the finale. What Archuleta does, he does brilliantly — he would have been a perfectly credible winner. The outcome simply didn’t matter — both of them will have recording contracts, hit records, huge audiences, and will make boatloads of money.

Both will be remembered as having been discovered by American Idol but no one will care which of them won, just as it hardly matters that Clay Aiken came in second.

With all the good music recorded on Idol this year, it is absurd to try to choose the single best track, but hey, I’m willing to be absurd. I think the very best performance of any song, period, was David Cook’s “Little Sparrow.” It’s a better song, at core, than “Billy Jean” or “Always Be My Baby” (Dolly Parton, unlike Mariah Carey or Michael Jackson, is a great songwriter).

My second choice for best track would have to be Archuleta singing “You’re the Voice.” Remember how Simon criticized his song choice? He was crazy. This was the song Archuleta decorated least — an anthem that he sang almost straight, completely from the heart. It was Archuleta’s best, realest performance.

My next choice would have to be Jason Castro singing Sting’s “Fragile,” which I thought was an absolutely brilliant reinterpretation of a song I already loved. Again, he was disparaged a bit for singing part of it in Spanish. Maybe because I speak Spanish and understood every word, I loved that!

And my final “best-of” pick would have to be from the finale, with songs Cook and Archuleta didn’t choose for themselves. I thought Cook’s cover of U2′s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” was moving and beautiful, and Archuleta’s cover of Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” was gorgeous.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under American Idol. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.