Clay Aiken On Love Song Covers, Top 40 Radio & His Fans
‘American Idol’ season two runner-up Clay Aiken is featured on Live@Yahoo!, where he performed his new single ‘Without You’ and was interviewed, where he discussed his new covers album ‘A Thousand Different Ways’, not being a big fan of current popular music, and his amazement that ‘Idol’ is still a huge draw.
“The genesis of the album, of this concept, really came forward five months into the process,” Aiken explained. “We started off making another studio album that was all original songs and as we continued, as we started doing that we considered adding more cover songs to the album, and Clive Davis, the president of BMG, had the idea to do an album full of love songs, of cover love songs, and that came about. This process of making the album has really taken us a long time, but I think we found something after a year and a half working on it that we’re all really excited about.”
“The hard part really was deciding which love songs not to do,” Aiken said of the process, “because we had this mountain of songs that everybody loved, and I sang them, and the ones that not only felt the most natural to me, but the ones we could change up a bit on our own and still maintain the integrity of the original song, but kind of throw our own twist on, those are the ones we decided to go with.”
As for new material on the release, Clay said, “There are four original songs on the albums. They’re songs we thought could hold up to these classic songs that were really great, one of which I actually helped write. I’m not gonna tell anyone which one, because then they’ll judge it.”
As for Clay not adapting to sounds of top 40 radio in his material, he explained, “There’s stuff on the radio that I do like nowadays, but a lot of stuff that’s on the radio is not necessarily me. I like songs that have great melodies, melody lines and whatnot. A lot of stuff on the radio is very dance oriented, hip hop oriented. That’s not something I’ll be doing soon is rapping, so thank god, because you don’t want to see that from me.”
“There are no other group of people like my fans,” Clay said of his loyal supporters. “They are energetic and are still to this day. You kind of get used to it but to some extent I still think, after they walk away, ‘Why the heck? I mean what?’ People who know me and have known me for years are like, ‘Oh my god, I would not be a fan of yours.’ They’re coming on season six (of ‘American Idol’), I was telling somebody last night, ‘Oh my god, I’m season two, they’re on season six’. You’d think it would have died out, so I’m still amazed that people are still interested.”
The performance and interview at Yahoo.com has since been removed.
