Adam’s sixth solo album is his most personal yet, so it is simply titled ADAM — because this man has paid his dues, time after time, so he needs no further introduction. The singer, actor, style-setter, and greatest American Idol alumnus of all time opened up about the album, including the major life changes and the ’90s electronica of his angst-ridden youth that inspired it; obsolete industry gatekeepers; double-standards about sexiness for male (especially queer male) and female pop stars; how he finally learned to “un-neuter” himself and “give less of a fuck” about what people think; performing solo vs. performing with Queen; and what to expect from his upcoming solo tour.

Click here to read the Q&A, and watch video of the full conversation below!

This year’s Emmy contenders for Outstanding Arts and Culture Documentary include John Candy: I Like Me, AKA Charlie Sheen, Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Martin Short’s Marty, Life Is Short… and then there’s Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery – The Untold Story. Once again, singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan is fighting a battle in a male-dominated field.

But McLachlan is used to that. She’s been doing just that since 1997, when she co-founded the all-women Lilith Fair music festival and proved all doubters and haters — who’d ludicrously claimed that so-called “pussy package” concerts could never sell tickets – very, very wrong. The inaugural Lilith Fair earned $16 million, making it the top-grossing of any touring festival that year.

Named after Adam’s mythical first wife – who, according to Mesopotamian and Jewish folklore, fled from the Garden of Eden because she refused to submit to her biblical husband — Lilith Fair was its own real-life utopia, built for and by women. A-list acts like Sheryl Crow, Paula Cole, Bonnie Raitt, Liz Phair, Shawn Colvin, Jewel, the Indigo Girls, and Natalie Merchant, all of whom appear in Building a Mystery, joined fierce forces with McLachlan to create what was one of the live music industry’s first truly safe spaces. McLachlan then responded to criticism that the first “Lily-White Fair” lineup wasn’t diverse enough by bringing on legends like Erykah Badu, Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill, Neneh Cherry, and even rising hip-hop superstar Missy Elliott (who’d never performed live publicly before appearing at Lilith Fair ’98), and the feminine phenomenon became even more massive — taking in $25 million in its second year, and $21 million in 1999. The festival also raised $10 million for various local charities during its historic, or herstoric, three-year run.

However, all was not well in McLachlan’s garden. As Lilith Fair became bigger, so did the backlash. Grumpy, rockist music critics (surprisingly even some female ones, like Gina Arnold and Ann Powers, although Powers eventually came around and actually appears in the Lilith documentary) blasted the festival for being overly earnest and unhip. Shock-jocks, SNL sketches, and late-night TV hosts made nasty jokes about Cole’s armpit hair or the stereotypical lesbian cat ladies who supposedly comprised Lilith’s audience. Pro-life protesters picketed Lilith Fair due to its support for Planned Parenthood and other feminist organizations. McLachlan and other Lilith acts fielded shockingly sexist, homophobic, or just plain ignorant questions at the tour’s daily press conferences. (McLachlan says she still gets “PTSD” when watching that excruciating footage in Building a Mystery.) And even at the 1998 Grammys, when three prominent Lilith Fair artists received multiple nominations — Best New Artist winner Cole; Best Female Pop Vocal Performance winner McLachlan; and Colvin, who received one the night’s top awards, for Record of the Year — they were lumped together for a tokenistic, Lilith-themed group number, rather than given their own performance slots during the ceremony. (McLachlan reveals in the Lilith documentary that she, Cole, and Colvin very seriously considered boycotting the Grammys that year.)

“Honestly, I think I always said to the people who shit on us or said we were all the negative things: ‘Show up. We will change your mind,’” McLachlan says with a sly smile. And despite all the above-mentioned backlash — and the fact that McLachlan decided to end the festival “on a high note” in 1999, just as the industry was shifting to shiny TRL pop and hypermasculine nu-metal, although she does “wonder what would’ve happened if we had done a fourth year of Lilith” — the festival’s impact was massive for Generation X and Xennials.

For instance, 45-year-old Brandi Carlile, who for the past eight years has hosted her own all-female Girls Just Wanna Weekend fest, gushes in Building a Mystery about how attending Lilith Fair as a teenager changed her life. And even if some female Gen Z musicians and their fans are unaware of the Lilith lore, they do walk the trail that McLachlan and her peers blazed for them: In Building a Mystery, an incredulous Olivia Rodrigo, age 23, confesses that she never even knew about Lilith Fair until recently, but she obviously has no problem selling tickets when she tours with female/female-fronted openers like the Last Dinner Party, Wolf Alice, Die Spitz, Remi Wolf, and the Breeders.

“Sarah started that and opened people’s eyes to that thinking, specifically in music,” declares Building a Mystery director Ally Pankiw. “I think that’s a huge thing that she needs to be applauded for.” In the Q&A below, Pankiw and McLachlan open up about Lilith’s legacy and their documentary — an Emmy-worthy story that, much like Lilith Fair itself, is female-driven in front of and behind the scenes.

LYNDSANITY: The first thing that surprised me at the beginning of this film was younger people saying they did not know about Lillith Fair. So, I think it’s interesting to see this film through the lens of today. Maybe young music fans, who see Taylor Swift touring with Boygenius and Hayley Williams, would be shocked to know that the idea of a multi-female-artist tour was once unheard-of in the music business. What stuck out to you when making this film about how the industry has changed, or sadly maybe not changed, since ‘97?

SARAH MCLACHLAN: I think the industry has changed a lot. I think that there are way more women in successful positions, who are using their platforms amazingly. That being said, the greater world is shifting in a very different direction. And as women gain more power, the old guys in the positions of power are trying to claw back, hold onto their power. So, there’s going to be this push and pull. But I love seeing what’s happening in music right now, and women and artists using their platforms to talk about this stuff and continue to push forward. That being said, there’s a long way to go.

ALLY PANKIW: Looking at it from a 2026 perspective, I can speak more to the entertainment industry at large. We’re kind of in a contraction point, where there has been a bit of a little punitive backswing of progress in terms of diversity, in basically who’s invested in the arts and in entertainment. I kind of put that together as I was making the doc. It was an interesting parallel of what I was experiencing in the industry today, and what was going on then and immediately after Lilith. I think that it all kind of lands under the same theme that no matter what era you look at, there’s going to be periods of time where there’s sort of a lie or a myth put in place to keep other people where they’re at, and not giving them the tools to lift themselves up or gain more privilege or power.

And so, I think what’s really remarkable about this doc. And to your point, young people might not know that that was the culture at the time, and they also might not know more widely how just incredibly misogynistic and homophobic and racist that time period was in pop culture and what the sort of prominent voice was in that time. But I think what’s so remarkable about Sarah’s story, and why I wanted to tell the story: She did the very brave but simple thing of just going, “I think that’s a lie. I just don’t believe it about myself, about my peers.” And so, she did this really remarkable thing, but from this very simple place of like, “I’m seeing the opposite be true with my own eyes, so I’m going to stand up against that existing sort of monolithic thinking,” at that time. I feel like we’re there again.

Speaking of lies or fallacies, in the mid ’90s, for the first time in history, more women were consuming more music than men were. Women were buying more CDs than men. And I’ve always thought that women and girls are predictors at the forefront of pop trends, driving the music market. So, where did this idea come from, that women can’t sell records, can’t sell tickets, or can’t sell radio ads if they’re played back-to-back on the radio? The statistics prove that’s not true.

MCLACHLAN: Those old-school attitudes prevailed in every industry. I mean, one of the crazy moments in the documentary is where [talent agent and Lilith Fair co-founder] Marty Diamond says, “We were trying to find corporate sponsors, and we went to a water company. and they said, ‘We’re marketing to guys.’” And like, it’s water!

Well, maybe women would like water if it was in a pink bottle…

PANKIW: Remember “Pens for Girls”? Bic did that and made pink pens. And everyone was like, “What?”

MCLACHLAN: We were dismissed on so many levels, consistently, and not taken seriously and put down. And if we had strong opinions, it was just like, “Oh, sweetie.” It just became really insulting, to a point where I would go to radio stations and they’d say, “We can’t add you this week because we added these other female artists.” And I thought, “We’re all different. Why are you allocating this tiny sliver of the pie to us and thinking that we’re going to be placated by this?” And same with promoters saying, “You can’t do this. You can’t put two women on the same bill.” Well, I’d already been doing that, to Ally’s point. I had been living in this world where it’s like, “This does work. It’s great. People like it. I know music. My tastes are not particular to a gender. It’s music.” I just thought that idea was ridiculous. And then of course, when men said, “You can’t do that, people won’t come,” all that did was put a fire under me to prove them wrong.

PANKIW: I think people have always underestimated young women’s taste and thought it wasn’t “cool.” But I really do think young women have great taste and are predictive in their taste, to your point. And I really do think one of my main goals with the doc was it made me the most upset that [Lilith Fair] was sort of misremembered as not being the coolest place to be those summers. And it was so cool and radical there! I wanted to show that side of it too. Sometimes it was trivialized or people said it was “too earnest,” but again, these are feminine qualities, so they’re put down in general pop culture. It’s like anything that women enjoy is kind of like a second-class thing.

Yes, people are always trying to yuck women’s yum. Like, what’s wrong with it if some women like pumpkin spice lattes? They’re delicious! Why is a beverage uncool because supposedly more women drink it?

PANKIW: Because it’s the myth that things we enjoy aren’t enjoyed also by men. And that also sucks for men. In the doc, Jewel was like, “Metalheads have to tell me secretly that they love my music. They don’t feel like they can announce it, but they’re like, ‘We’re big fans.’” That’s so sad too for all genders, for taste to be gatekept in this weird way.

What was interesting to me was a sort of internalized misogyny, because a lot of women also bashed Lilith Fair at the time. Female music critics like Gina Arnold put it down, and there were some female musicians who at least initially didn’t want to do Lilith Fair because they thought it was a bad look. I’ll even admit that maybe back in the day I thought that if you’re a “rock chick” you have to be one of the guys and not go see women play acoustic guitars. A powerful moment in your film is when Thao Nguyen, from Tao & the Get Down Stay Down, talks about this and actually starts to cry, like she feels really bad about bashing the festival when she was young.

MCLACHLAN: Well, that was survival at the time too. That was the myth that was normalized. Ann Powers as well — she kind of tore us apart.

Wait, she did? Ann is in your documentary, and it looks like she had a great time at Lilith Fair.

MCLACHLAN: No, she tore us apart [in the ‘90s], and I was heartbroken because I thought, “This is a woman!” But then a little while later I was thinking, “This is a woman who is existing in a system built by men, for men, and she’s one woman.” And if you want to get along and be part of that world, you kind of have to go along with the prevailing attitudes or you’re out. You’re out really quickly, because it’s very unforgiving to have those kind of attitudes. So, it took me a while to forgive her, because I sort of think women should know better.

So, Ann being in the doc, talking about how important and fun Lilith was, is a full-circle moment.

MCLACHLAN: She alluded gently to maybe not having … she didn’t own it in the same way [as Nguyen did].

PANKIW: She just felt “weird” there, but I think it just goes back to the unlearning that unfortunately a lot of women and other people spend decades, well into their adulthood — the unlearning of what you thought you liked, who you thought you were. And to Sarah’s point about survival, this project has been such a gift, because it’s really highlighted that unlearning that I’m already doing in my life, as a woman approaching 40 who was a young girl and a teenager in the ’90s and early 2000s. I did the exact same thing. All these things that I knew in this sort of ancient place of what I actually liked and what I thought was cool and what I thought was great art, I gave those things away. You have to hide those parts of yourself because earnestness and things that were sort of more traditionally feminine were not “cool.” They were not cool in the early 2000s, especially. And I think probably Ann Powers has spent a few decades unlearning as well some of the myths she believed about her own taste. … So, I don’t hold it against anyone who came up in that time, because it’s an impossible hill or place to climb out from. And I think some people never climb out from it and still are holding a lot of internalized misogyny. Probably being a lesbian helped me get over it faster!

MCLACHLAN: Honestly, I think I always said to the people who shit on us or said we were all the negative things: “Show up. We will change your mind.”

PANKIW: And you did.

MCLACHLAN: Come and be part of it. And yeah, I think Ann even alluded to that as well, where it’s just like, “Oh, yeah, dang it, this is kind of fun. It’s kind of cool. Oh, I’m not allowed to say that, but…”

We can all say it now!

MCLACHLAN: We were too busy just doing it. We were busy celebrating each other’s great music and having incredible times every night performing with each other and getting to know each other and creating this community that didn’t exist, and getting rid of the competition that existed to keep us apart. It was like, “No, we’re going to break down all those walls.” And so it was, for me, incredibly joyful. I mean, certainly there were some moments of PTSD watching some of the press conferences! But honestly, I glaze things over and I’m always looking for silver linings. I forgot how prevailing and pervasive that negativity and that bro culture really was back then. I had friends who were still in the closet because they didn’t feel comfortable coming out. And now I think about that, and that’s crazy. Back then, it didn’t seem so crazy. And it wasn’t that long ago.

A recurring theme throughout this film is, we didn’t really have the term “safe spaces” back then, but that Little Fair was a safe space. Even the film’s producer, Dan Levy, who was a closeted young gay boy in the ‘90s, said it’s an early memory of him feeling safe when he went to the festival. Women, in the audiences and onstage, felt safe, whether that was safe to be themselves and just have a good time, or physically safe, like safe from being groped or leered at or worse. Tell me about what it felt like to be there.

MCLACHLAN: I think that was one of the big desires in my mind, to create this safe space, this place where all these women can be together celebrating each other, getting to know each other, learning from each other, like having mothers and aunties there. That kind of community is so powerful and so important. I think we’ve really lost that as a society. I certainly didn’t have that. I grew up in isolation. My family were on the other side of the coast, so I just had my immediate family and I didn’t have a lot of friends and felt really lonely for most of my childhood. So, to come into this situation where you are instantly held and honored for who you are, without any pretense, on a very equal footing, it felt like coming home in a lot of ways. It took a bit for that to come out. I was a little bit shy and didn’t know that I could just come up to people and start talking to them. Honestly, when the Indigo Girls showed up, that was so amazing because they were just like, “OK, we’re going to play with everybody! Don’t you want to play together?” I’m like, “Yes, I so do! I don’t know how to do this.” I remember Jewel saying the same thing, like, “I didn’t know how to ask.” They really blew everything open, and then that’s when the floodgates sort of opened. And it was multi-generational too, because Emmylou Harris was there, Bonnie Raitt was there. Learning and witnessing women from a different generation, who had been through so much more than we had been through, and hearing their stories and feeling their respect and admiration and cheering us on, it felt really, really powerful.

In Vanity Fair’s Lilith Fair oral history, Bonnie Raitt actually said Lilith was the best live experience of her 50-plus-year entire career.

PANKIW: And imagine the generation that she came from and what the industry looked like. When you talk about Sarah creating a safe space and this sort of utopian ecosystem… I think this doc is a nice reminder that the systems built by women — not just in arts and entertainment, but if you broaden that out, it can apply to many places and many parts of our society — they’re safer, they’re more equitable, they’re more diverse, they run more smoothly, they protect people, they’re intergenerational. They don’t leave different generations behind. But I think this is an important thing to mention too, especially in the moment in time we’re in right now and all the sort of backsliding that we’re seeing everywhere: It wasn’t just a warm, fuzzy feeling. It was incredibly financially successful and commercially viable and this massive success, sold-out everywhere. … I think it’s also still the most successful financial touring festival. I think about that so often, like what a great example that women investing in their systems and ideas is not a risk. It’s a huge opportunity, and it’s not just to tick a box. Again, to go back to Taylor Swift and these massive [female] artists, no one would think of those people as business risks. But Sarah started that and opened people’s eyes to that thinking, specifically in music. And so, I think that’s a huge thing that she needs to be applauded for.

Sarah, did you feel at the time that you were doing something important or game-changing, or is that something you only realized in retrospect?

MCLACHLAN: All of the above! Yeah, in the midst of it, I was too busy to even know what we were doing. I didn’t really understand the larger ramifications of it until halfway through the first tour. Actually, in 1997, we did four test runs, which proved the model with the promoters that we had relationships with. And then we went into the greater world and said, “OK, we’re going to do this.” They were like, “You can’t do that,” and I’m like, “Well, we just did, and we sold out every time! So yes, we can!” But even then, with promoters, or many of them, we had to shoulder 100 percent of the guarantee. There was no underwriting it. They didn’t want to take the chance. It took us a while to prove ourselves, but we did. But in the middle of it, it’s very hard to have any kind of perspective other than, “This is amazing, this is so much fun, this is so much work, it’s so exhausting, it’s so all-encompassing.” This idea that we are moving the dial forward, I think that came over time with the success of it, with the second year, getting more diverse artists that initially said no because it was not cool enough or not proven, whatever reasons. I went, “Listen, just look at how many fans show up. Do you want to diversify your audiences? Do you want to get new fans?” It’s actually very simple, and it’s financially a smart choice to make, and a smart choice any manager should make for their young artist. It took a while for those things to build and to become understandable.

And now, having years of time in between, women who were there as young people are coming up to me over the years and saying, “I was there, and you showed me that I could do and be anything I wanted to be, to dream big! Now I’m the head of my law firm and I’m bringing along women to be my partners.” Hundreds of stories like that. So, that legacy of celebrating each other, of caring for each other, of supporting each other and bringing each other alongside, that has continued in the same way. That was the legacy, of giving. A big part of it for me was being able to leave a lasting impact, not just musically, but on the community. Like, how do we actually help the community? So, being able to give a dollar of every ticket sale, which is a nominal amount, but sometimes that was upwards of $30,000 and sometimes the biggest single check that any of these [local charitable] organizations [in ever tour stop] had ever received. That is what made the press conferences so much less painful, because they were generally very painful, but I got to be the lucky person at the end to give the check to the local charity. It’s amazing that all of us together built this thing that could go out and not only put on a great show and entertain people and bring people together and create a community, but could leave a lasting impact to continue to help women and marginalized citizens in that community. I took the money I made from Lilith and put it into foundation and started my music schools. And so, that legacy of giving continues, 25 years later.

PANKIW: If everyone could be Sarah McLachlan, the world would be a much better place.

I wish that were the case, but there’s only one Sarah McLachlan! We were talking about safe spaces, and the last year of the original Lilith Fair was also the year of the infamously violent Woodstock ’99, a festival that couldn’t have been more opposite to Lilith. It seemed to signify an abrupt culture shift, back to toxic masculinity or bro culture, that’s still very prevalent today. What happened?

PANKIW: That’s a big question, but I often reference a really brilliant book by this author named Sophie Gilbert called Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. It talks about this shift from some of the power and autonomy from women in entertainment. The pendulum swings, and sometimes it is in response to progress. She has an interesting chapter about music transitioning from the ’90s to the 2000s. She says it did feel a bit like a punitive pendulum swing, and she has a line that is so chilling: “The women of the ’90s were replaced by the girls of the 2000s.” And I think that was not just in music but in pop culture in general, in terms of who was becoming a star and a celebrity. It felt like people with ownership over their own careers, and then there was then this push to have a lot of young people that didn’t have full ownership over their careers, where a lot of a bigger machine could own a piece of the money of these younger artists. I don’t think that fully answers your question, but I think it’s indicative of some of that shift into the early 2000s. As for how Woodstock ’99 plays into that, I mean, Sheryl Crow [who played both Lilith Fair and Woodstock ‘99] says it in the doc. She says [in a press conference scene], “I hope [Woodstock ‘99] is not an indication of where we’re headed as a country!” And you kind of go ugh when you watch that line, because for a moment it felt like this vulnerability and sentimentality and lyricism was front and center. And then different types of music and art and movies kind of rushed in to replace some of that in the early 2000s.

MCLACHLAN: I often wonder what would’ve happened if we had done a fourth year of Lilith. I was exhausted and I was done, and my record label was screaming for a new record. And I’m always of the mindset of “end on a high note.” I just had this feeling that by doing it another year, the success of it might start to wane, and that would be a real bummer. But it’s true that I felt by the next year, [pop music was dominated by] boy bands and girl bands and very fabricated, part of a larger machine typically run by men, created by men, to make a lot of money and be a very particular narrative. It did kind of feel like the door slammed closed a little bit. [The women of Lilith Fair] as individual artists all continued to make music and continued to be successful, but the media machine moved on to something else, as it does. There wasn’t massive focus. And so, it is cyclical in that way. But hindsight is everything.

@livieshq watch the #LilithFairDoc to hear how the women of the festival impacted our very own @Olivia Rodrigo “lilith fair: building a mystery – the untold story” is now streaming on @hulu and hulu on @Disney+ #OliviaRodrigo #LilithFair ♬ original sound – livies hq

It’s touched on very briefly in the film that you did try to revive Lilith Fair in 2010, but maybe it was a bit too early to do that, because it wasn’t as successful as it had been in the ‘90s. But next year is the 30th anniversary of the festival, and with everything we’re talking about, where society is at right now, plus there are many amazing female artists re dominating the pop space right now, is there a chance Lilith could be revived? Maybe even for just some kind of one-off anniversary event next year? I feel the world needs Lilith Fair right now.

PANKIW: And you’re like, “Can I get tickets?” [laughs]

MCLACHLAN: Actually, I didn’t even realize it was the 30th anniversary coming! Stay tuned. I have nothing in the plans, but there are always things brewing, moving forward.

This Q&A, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch Sarah McLachlan & Ally Pankiw discuss full interview in the video at the top of this page.

photo: Facebook

When Clay Aiken triumphantly returned to the American Idol stage for this week’s Season 24 finale, rocking a new fashion-forward look (palazzo pants, pastel polka-pot blouse, peroxided pixie), he performed his first original single in 18 years: the smooth adult-pop bop “Rewind,” which jumped to No. 1 on iTunes’ pop chart the next day. He also dueted with finalist Braden Rumfelt on Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” the ballad he fatefully performed during his own season’s Wild Card round on March 4, 2003… the very day that Braden was born.

Aiken’s appearance was full-circle in so many ways, and yet another iconic finale moment in his long and never linear Idol journey. For instance, when he placed second to Ruben Studdard back in Season 2 (which still holds the Nielsen record for the highest-rated Idol finale of all time, with a whopping 38.6 million viewers), he became the stuff of urban legend when he accidentally peeped Ruben’s name on the results card, five minutes before Ryan Seacrest actually announced the winner.

But that wasn’t nearly as wild as Aiken’s surprise cameo on the second-most-watched Idol finale, the one that capped off the series’ most-watched season overall, Season 5. That was the night that a glowed-up and almost unrecognizable Aiken — sporting an even more drastic makeover than this year’s, with his flat-ironed, Lego-hair emo bob and designer suit — ambushed No. 1 Claymate Michael Sandecki for sing an unrehearsed “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” duet. And chaos ensued.

Clay Aiken with Lyndsey Parker at the ‘American Idol’ Season 24 finale

The hype surrounding those watercooler-chatter moments — in an era of “appointment television” when people actually gathered around TV sets every week to watch Idol, and in office breakrooms the morning after to gossip about the joke auditions, performances, eliminations, and Simon Cowell’s most vicious one-liners — solidified Aiken’s status as Idol’s first non-winner to break out as a superstar. (Over the course of his career, he’s sold roughly 5 million albums in America.) And to this day, Aiken is still considered one of Idol’s all-time greatest success stories, the ultimate representation of what the show was always supposed to be: a platform for atypical, unconventional, but extremely gifted singers who would never otherwise get a real shot at pop stardom.

While Aiken hasn’t released new original music in a long time, he has stayed busy and stayed in the headlines. He’s done Broadway; toured with Studdard (and even competed with Studdard as the Beets on The Masked Singer); co-founded the disabled children’s charity the National Inclusion Project; and worked with other charitable organizations like UNICEF, the Ronald McDonald House, Make a Wish Foundation, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. And in his personal life, he came out as gay in since 2008 — the same year that his last pop single came out, and the year that his son Parker was born.

Aiken, now 47, also had a credible if brief political career, running for the U.S. House of Representatives in North Carolina’s 2nd congressional district in 2014 and actually winning the Democratic primary, and then running in the Democratic primary for North Carolina’s 4th congressional district in 2022 and finishing third. But as he spoke with Lyndsanity on the Idol set, he made it clear that he hadn’t put music on hold to focus on being a politician.

“No, that was not why I left. It’s not why I stopped doing music,” he stressed. “It’s maybe why I came back to music, because I think politics is disgusting, broken… what are other negative words I can use? It’s just not healthy for this country. And I’d hoped it would be. I don’t feel like people are doing things that improve people’s lives and make them happier. And I think music can. And does.”

In the thoroughly entertaining Q&A below, Aiken rewinds to the start of his Idol career, as he reminisces about those historic Season 2 and Season 5 finales, the scandalous “Breast Friend” photo that sparked a tabloid frenzy, and why now is the perfect time for him to relaunch his music career, now that he’s an “empty-nester.”

Suffice to say, this wild card held nothing back.

LYNDSANITY: Your whole theme tonight is “Rewind,” and along with your single by that title, you sang “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” with Braden Rumfelt. But this year marks the anniversary of when you appeared on probably the most bonkers American Idol finale ever, Season 5’s. There was a duet by Katharine McPhee with Meat Loaf, a surprise performance by Prince… but the moment I remember most of all is when you did “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” with Michael Sandecki. What do you remember about that duet?

CLAY AIKEN: I remember that [Sandecki] scared me! Oh my God. I remember that he scared me so much in that moment that I missed my entrance. And I missed it tonight, too. Braden didn’t scare me, but I missed it tonight. And he rescued me. That’s a true professional right there, Braden.

I did not even notice.

Of course. But he noticed! I’ve done that song many, many times myself over the years. I did it with Ruben Studdard on tour a few years ago, and the way they arranged it then, they shortened a little break between his line and mine. And I never could get it in my head to wait to come in before two measures. And tonight, I was so intensely concerned about coming in too late that I came in too early.

Well, no one will remember that. But people still remember you and Michael Sandecki. I don’t even think if it was advertised at that time that you were going to appear on the Season 5 finale, so you shocked everyone.

Yes, it was surprise, which you could tell by Michael’s face.

How did you keep it all under wraps?

Well, believe it or not, I did not have access to tell Michael Sandecki that I was coming on the show. So, it wasn’t very difficult to keep a secret from him. [laughs]

Fair enough. The real surprise that night was your “makeover,” though.

Oh yeah, the brunette. That [Season 5 finale] makeover was not planned. The makeover was sort of accidental. Do you think I decide what my hair’s going to look like? [laughs] I sat in the chair this evening with Dean Banowetz, who did my hair back in the day, and I said, “I don’t care. You do what you want to do.” So, I sat in the chair back that day [in 2006], and Steve Davio was his name, and he just invented all of that. That was a new look. You notice it didn’t last long, because I didn’t know how to do it!

That was exactly 20 years ago, and here you are, doing that song on the show again.

So, I’ll see you again in 20 more! [laughs] Maybe. I’ll be 70.

Since we’re “rewinding” now, I do have to ask about maybe the biggest Idol urban legend ever: That you saw the Season 2 finale results card in Ryan’s hand, saying Ruben had won, before Ryan made the announcement. Is that really true?

Yes. I have absolutely no doubt Ryan has never, ever done that again. When we were on Season 2, we didn’t know it was going to be big when we auditioned. We didn’t know it was big while we were on it! I think Ryan probably did, because he had access to the real world and he was doing his own shows too, but we on the show didn’t know it was a big deal. There were 50 people who worked on our season, on the production, and there’s probably 300 here now. So, it was a lot more laid-back, for sure. I have no doubt in my mind that Ryan has never made that mistake again. But it wasn’t even a mistake on his part. He was turned around, and all I did was look over his shoulder. I just kind of peeked at it real quick, looked over his shoulder right before we all walked on. So, I knew — which was better for me, right? Nerves are gone that way.

I don’t recall your expression giving anything away. You had a good poker face.

Are you kidding me? Hold on! The whole time, I’m looking at Ruben. There was no disappointment, because we weren’t competitive from the beginning. Would I have liked to have won? Sure. But the only reason that I wished I had won was in Seasons 3 and 4 and 5 and whatnot, the winner’s pictures were in the artwork, and mine wasn’t.

But you set the template for successful non-winners. Before there was Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson, or Adam Lambert, people would cite you as an example of how winning the show isn’t everything. Rolling Stone even put you on their cover first, before Ruben!

I wonder if they regret that! [laughs] I didn’t even know who they were. I didn’t know what Rolling Stone was. Oh God, I was such an idiot. I was so sheltered in North Carolina. I mean, I’d heard of it, but I thought it was more about the song.

“Like a Rolling Stone”?

No, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”

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For your whole “Rewind” campaign, you’re doing these cute flashback posts, and you recreated your Rolling Stone “Growing Up Clay” cover pose. Why did you do that?

Because I have professionals who are social media experts, who are telling me, “Stand here and then pull your shirt and we’re going to pretend it’s Rolling Stone.”

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[pauses to chat with a woman passing by on the set, then resumes interview] I’m so sorry. That was Mezhgan [Hussainy]. She did makeup on the season I was on. She did my face. And I’ll tell you — which I probably shouldn’t, but I’m going to tell you, and you can use it as you want — we both got in trouble because we took a picture one time [back when Hussainy was actually dating Simon Cowell] with me standing behind her, and my hands were on her boobs.

as seen on TMZ 

Like that famous Janet Jackson Rolling Stone cover?

Well, I was in the picture with her. It was obvious they were my hands. Oh my God, I got in trouble for that! It was like, a tabloid story. At the time, I was not publicly out, but I mean, people figured, so ironically, I was like: “So, which is it, motherfuckers? Am I gay or am I ‘molester’? Make up your damn mind!” Oh, I got in trouble for that, and she just said she got in trouble for it too. But that was brilliant. … Someone [a fan] just posted it the other day and said she had put [the photo] on her wall. She’d taken it and put her face over [Hussainy’s] face and put it on her wall, as like an aspiration. This is what she had hoped for.

I can’t believe how long ago that was! It was a very different time. And I can’t believe it has been 18 years since you released a single.

Yeah, 2008 — right before my son was born. He’s 18 now, and he wants me out of the house! I’m about to be an empty-nester, and a big part of why I stopped [doing music] was I didn’t want to be on the road or working when he was growing up. Now I’m done with that job. So, I’m going back to the old one! [laughs] It just felt right. I went on tour with Ruben, and I kind of realized that I missed it more than I thought I did. I realized this was an opportunity to do something that I wanted to get back to.

Carrie Underwood is always flying the flag for hard rock and heavy metal on American Idol (who can forget her impromptu audition-room covers of Korn and Drowning Pool last year?), so when she got to perform “Home Sweet Home” (a song she recorded as Idol’s farewell anthem in Season 9) and “Kickstart My Heart” with her heroes Motley Crue on this week’s Season 24 finale, she was in rock ‘n’ roll heaven.

“It was great. They were very lovely, and I’m like, ‘Welcome to my fever dream!’” the champion-turned-judge excitedly told reporters backstage Monday. “I don’t know how to describe this. It’s so random and amazing. I feel like American Idol has given me so much. Obviously being on the show, winning the show, coming back as judge… and now I’m singing with Billy Idol and Motley Crue? I’m just loving life right now.”

Unfortunately, while Underwood was thrilled with country singer Hannah Harper’s victory this year — describing herself as “a stan for Hannah” and saying, “I see a bit of myself in her” — her hopes of crowing a rock champion, or even just having rock representation in the top 10, were quickly dashed this year.

All of Season 24′s hard-rockin’ early standouts — like Noah Orion (that double-demin’d dude who cruised up to the auditions in his “wall of sound” deconstructed school bus, screeching Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”), emo belter Vincent Fondale, butt-rockers Kutter Bradley and Isaiah Moro, alt girl Genevieve Heyward, or even seasoned Great White frontman Brett Carlisle — went home early. Only Kutter and Genevieve even made it to fan-voted rounds.

But Underwood revealed that it was the elimination of another rocker in the top 20 (one that covered Heart’s “Alone,” a power ballad that was a breakthrough for Carrie in Season 4) that upset her the most. “Madison Moon was my girl,” she lamented. “She had such an incredible voice. I was devastated when she left.”

Underwood is all for having a metal-themed night in Season 25, although she “might pick more, like, nü-metal” if it was up to her. But which rock star would she want to be Nü-Metal Night’s guest mentor or judge?

“I’m friends with Jacoby Shaddix and he’s so uplifting and positive and amazing. I think he would be an incredible mentor,” she suggested, referring to the lead singer of recent collabortors Papa Roach. “I mean, there’s a lot of subgenres within the metal genre, so I think there’s something for everybody.”

So, Underwood still hasn’t given up on her fever dream that a hard-rocker from any subgenre could win American Idol one day, following in the footsteps of Season 13’s Caleb Johnson. “I’m always trying to encourage the rock singers when they come on the show, and I will give them a chance,” she declared. “Maybe we just need to keep at it. If we keep at it, then eventually America will be on board.”

For the past three years, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees have been announced live on American Idol, with the news often excitedly delivered by an actual Hall of Famer, the Class of 2022’s Lionel Richie. And Kelly Clarkson, the first Idol champion, will become eligible for Hall induction next year —  yes, artists become eligible 25 years after their first commercially released recording, and incredibly, Clarkson’s “A Moment Like This” came out in 2002! — the same year that Idol will celebrate its landmark 25th season.

Backstage at Season 24’s Idol finale, when this surprising math was pointed out and Richie was asked about the possibility of Clarkson ((who performed with Class of 2024 inductees Foreigner at that year’s Hall ceremony) being nominated or even inducted, he noticeably brightened.

“This will be the best thing ever for American Idol!” Richie exclaimed, although he acknowledged that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame committee’s behind-closed-doors nominating process baffles him sometimes. “The trick with [the Hall] is, you don’t know. Whenever you have that society… I’m sitting there going, ‘OK, it’s about time for Tina Turner.’ And then all of a sudden, years later [in the Class of 2021], it was Tina Turner. But one thing I will say is, that would be the fairytale ending story of life [for Clarkson to enter the Hall] —  if we can pull that off.”

On the Season 24 Idol finale, Richie was joined by his fellow judges Carrie Underwood and Luke Bryan for a performance of his 1986 crossover country hit “Deep River Woman” — Underwood’s idea, which he said was “one of the greatest compliments” that made him feel like a “proud bird.” And that wasn’t the first time this season that one of Richie’s songs was performed on the show — top 10 finalist Daniel Stallworth memorably had a breakthrough moment when he covered “All Night Long” in Hawaii. But as Richie and reporters discussed the subjects of rock ‘n’ roll, classic Idol moments that might be revisited to celebrate next year’s 25th season, and Lionel Richie covers, the conversation turned to one of the most historic and game-changing performances in Idol history.

So, what did Richie think of Season 7 winner David Cook’s “Hello”? Richie brightened even more when asked that question.

“Normally, I’m a nervous wreck when somebody says, ‘I’m doing this song,’” he admitted, recalling his initial reaction back in 2008. But as Richie often likes to say on Idol, Cook made “Hello” his own.

“When someone takes your song and makes it theirs, where you just don’t think anymore about me singing it, you just go, ‘I love the interpretation.’ He wore it out. Killed it. I’m glad you [asked about] that, because [Cook's performance] happened so fast. Again, the show is still running, but that was an amazing moment. I’ll go back now and watch clips, because now you can stop and think.

“We all have a little joke with this: If you are memorable, let’s say you’re top 40, and If [viewers] can remember a performance or a name, that’s a star,” Richie continued (adding that “the real hard work, and the real competition” is about to begin for newly crowned champion Hannah Harper). “You have to understand we’re at that point now where it’s: make it memorable. And that [Cook performance] was a memorable moment.”

When 25-year-old mom Hannah Harper won American Idol on Monday, it was a slightly bittersweet occasion, because the Season 24 finale took place just one day after Mother’s Day. It was actually Harper’s first Mother’s Day separated from her three young sons, who were 1,700 miles away in Willow Springs, Mo.

“I cried a lot,” Harper admitted backstage after her Idol victory. “I can’t wait to be home with them. All day, I was just pretending like it wasn’t the day. It was hard.”

Harper became a frontrunner early on this season, when her startlingly vulnerable original audition song about her postpartum struggles, “String Cheese,” resonated deeply with viewers — becoming one of the most-watched clips in American Idol history, with more than 100 million plays so far. The song especially resonated with judge and fellow boy-mom Carrie Underwood, and in a torch-passing moment of sorts, Harper is now only the second female country singer to win Idol, and the first to do so since Underwood triumphed in 2005.

“That’s some big shoes to fill, huge shoes to fill. I feel honored to carry that badge, but also stick to my stomach knowing that I have to carry that badge,” Harper admitted. She revealed that Underwood gave her advice about juggling motherhood with country stardom —  “She’s got it down now; she’s got cribs on her bus” —  but also acknowledged that male singers don’t usually seem as concerned about that, or at least aren’t asked about that sort of work/life balance in interviews. (For instance, last year’s winner, proud girl-dad Jamal Roberts, rarely fielded such questions.)

“It is totally different. It is very different,” Harper pointed out. “My husband [Devon Mendenhall] has had to sacrifice everything so that I could be here, and we basically just had to reverse roles — which has been confusing for everyone, because a man is not ‘built’ to do that. He’s had to give up his entire life, his work, to be Mr. Mom. And he’s stepped up admirably and done a great job. I could never repay him for all the things that he has sacrificed. I think that more importantly, my boys needed that in life, because men having a father-son relationship is so crucial for the kind of man that they grow up to be. I love getting to watch it, and I don’t regret any of it. I hope that he feels the same way and he’s still excited to do it, but there’s no way I could do it without him.”

photo: Eric McCandless

Some alpha-males, sadly, would not be OK with this sort of gender-flip, or would come to secretly (or not-so-secretly) resent their partner’s success. So, Harper was quick to express her gratitude for Mendenhall’s endless, ego-less encouragement.

“That man has never made me feel like my flame should be any dimmer than it needs to be. I actually wrote a song [about Mendenhall]. It’s called ‘My Hero, A Simple Man,’” Harper said. She also noted that while many female Idol  contestants have deferred their music dreams to focus on family, like last season’s Breanna Nix or this season’s third-place finalist Keyla Richardson, she was fortunate to have such an incredible support system — which, unfortunately, isn’t always the case for ambitious mothers.

“As much as I would like to say that [this American Idol win] was my own doing, if I didn’t have a village of people behind me, there’s no way that I would have been able to,” she stressed. “Most moms in the work field have to fight to try to find a babysitter. I was blessed with people who were backing me the entire way that allowed this to happen, but finding your village is important. And it should be a priority for all moms, because you need help. You need help. It’s so hard to do this by yourself, especially single moms like Keyla — she has worked so hard to get here and she has paved the way on her own, but still has done it with grace.”

Just as Harper began her Season 24 journey with a personal song about her domestic life, “String Cheese,” she ended it with Monday’s finale-night original, “Married Into This Town,” making her the only top three contestant to perform her own material live on the show this season.

“One of my very first writers’ rooms was with a couple guys and I was getting to know them, and [Nashville veteran Scott Stepakoff said], ‘Tell us about where you’re from.’ And I told them a little town of 200 people called Bunker, Mo.,” she said of the song’s inspiration. “He was like, ‘But your paper says Willow Springs,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I married into Willow.’ And he was like, ‘Well, that’s our song. I don’t need to know anything else about you. We have to write that song.’ … So, I wrote a love story about that.”

“My Hero, A Simple Man” and “Married Into This Town” are on Harper’s Facebook page, along with many other originals that haven’t yet been officially released. (She explained that she was “kind of scared” to perform more of her own compositions on Idol, because she wasn’t sure about “the publishing side of things.”) But suffice to say, she has “a good catalog to choose from,” and as long as her husband and village are behind her, she’s planning to make her kids proud, as she prepares to record her debut album.

This mother’s day has come. As Harper told reporters: “I’m ready.”

photo: Sam Desantis

Eighteen (yes, 18!) years ago, a fresh-faced, heart-sleeved Appalachian teen named Josiah Leming — now better known as for his acclaimed Americana namesake band Josiah and the Bonnevilles, whose brilliant fourth studio album As Is comes out this week — memorably appeared on American Idol. Leming’s time on the show was brief; he was cut during Hollywood Week, a controversial decision that generated national headlines and outrage at the time. But his willingness to be so open and emotional, both onstage and onscreen, made a lasting impression — so much so that Leming became the first Idol contestant (and, according to Wikipedia, still the only contestant) to not make the top 24 yet still land a major-label deal, when Perry Watts-Russell (the A&R man who signed Coldplay and Radiohead in the U.S.) brought him over to Warner Bros.

But despite the fairytale that Idol itself tries to sell aspiring musicians, inking a record contract is not an automatic happy ending. And after his deals with Warner and later Vagrant Records and British indie Yucatan Records didn’t pan out, Leming started to seriously question his career path. It was a sense of doubt that had actually always haunted him. “I used to tell Perry, ‘I’m just afraid I’ll write a song one day and then I’ll never write another one again,’” he admits, speaking with Lyndsanity from his Nashville home. “And I think a lot of that came from that boom-or-bust mentality of having so much visible ‘success’ when I was 18, thrusting me into the pop world. I mean, I remember being 23 years old and thinking it was already too late, thinking I was toast.”

But at this point, in 2021, the label-less Leming was now 33. “By that age, music just involved a lot of pain for me,” he recalls. “It was even to the point sometimes where was I like, ‘Do I even want to pursue this as a career? Or do I want to do other things [to pay the bills], and still do music [as a hobby] but maybe not be so at odds with it?’”

And so, a resigned Leming got regular day jobs, as a bartender and Amazon warehouse worker, and for a year and a half, he set his music dreams aside. But then, coming out of the pandemic in 2022, he began posting on TikTok. And ironically, the two things that had captured Idol viewers’ attention in 2008 — Leming’s vulnerability, and his unique cover songs — suddenly made him a bigger star than he’d ever been before.

At first, Leming shared humble home-studio clips of covers by his favorite relatively obscure singer-songwriters, like Townes Van Zandt. But then his former Vagrant A&R rep and good friend, Jeremy Maciak (“the smartest guy I know”), suggested he cover “artists with living fanbases, which was hilarious,” Leming chuckles. Hilarious or not, Leming heeded that advice, and he quickly went viral with his gorgeous acoustic interpretations of Justin Bieber’s “Ghost,” Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves,” and Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.”

Leming has since been afforded opportunities that weren’t even within his reach at age 23 (or age 18), playing dream venues like Red Rocks, the Grand Ole Opry, and two sold-out nights at L.A.’s Troubadour, and he has a new deal with Rounder Records. But he has never forgotten where he came from (the 30,000-population town of Morristown, Tenn., where he grew up as one of nine children, including adopted six younger siblings), or especially where he was in life just recently. So, As Is a working-class-hero masterpiece, a sort of Nebraska for the modern age, that he could have never created in his teens or twenties.

Leming’s lyrics, even on the upbeat tracks that make As Is a perfect summer soundtrack, paint stark yet vivid snapshots of gritty blue-collar survival: graveyard shifts, bar brawls and battles with the bottle, waiting for paychecks, saving up to buy a pickup truck, the fear of AI decimating the workforce, finding “God on a burned CD,” yearning to escape small-town life… and yearning for the small-town sweetheart that got left behind.

“I feel a bit of a responsibility. I don’t feel like there’s a lot of music — and I’ve felt this way for a long time — that’s being made for regular people,” Leming explains. “You just don’t see a lot of real, honest music for people in their thirties, people who are on the flipside of youth and have learned some hard lessons. It’s important to me to try to speak about those things. As more and more jobs become computer-based, I do feel sometimes like I’m singing to a shrinking population of people, like my dad [who worked in a furniture factory], which makes me a little bit sad. But it makes me feel like it’s even more important to capture this life that may not be around one day.”

Leming chooses not to be overtly political in his lyrics (probably the closest he gets is a line in As Is’s opening track, “Good Boy,” about “wrestlers [who] try out politics”), because he never wants to sound preachy or condescending. But he stresses, “I do think as you get older, it’s important that this stuff has a social correctness to it, that it reflects the times that we’re living in. Because I’m living in these times just like everybody else. I’m as shocked as anyone when I go to the gas pump right now, or to the grocery store. So, I think there might be something really wrong if my music didn’t reflect where we’re at.”

What also makes As Is so relatable is Leming’s frank, dark-night-of-the-soul revelations about his mental health (in “One Day at a Time,” he confesses, “I’m learnin’ not to hate myself”), which perhaps isn’t surprising coming from the singer who was once characterized as the “crying kid who lives in his car” by American Idol’s producers. Leming says MusiCares recently funded his first-ever therapy sessions so he could “work through those feelings that I’d failed,” and that was hugely helpful as he rebooted his career and found hope and success on his own terms.

“I come from a place where [going to therapy] is just not accepted, or it wasn’t when I was a kid. People don’t seek mental healthcare, or mental healthcare is actually not even available,” says Leming. “And I always had such a huge amount of sadness, especially as an artist. I’m very proud to talk about this now, because music is a really, really difficult job. It’s very easy to ride the good times, but then you sort of end up out on this island and don’t understand why you feel so bad. It’s the contradictory nature of even being an artist whose career is soaring: To the outside eye, it looks like it’s soaring, but internally, it’s really a disaster. And I think it’s really worth shining a light on that, letting people know it’s totally OK to feel sad, especially in this really difficult career.”

Although Leming, who’s now 36, owes a lot of his relatively late-in-life career success to TikTok, he has ironically pulled back from social media lately, realizing that it’s detrimental to his mental health (the very first line on his new album is even “I’ve been stayin’ out and off the internet”). Leming admits, That’s something I’m still learning to balance after 2022 to 2024, when the Bonnevilles were everywhere and the online. Everything I shared in those years, I would just flip on the camera and tell people how I was feeling, and I did get to the point then where I was feeling the necessity to keep feeding the beast of the internet, which is insatiable. It got to the point before where I was just posting because I knew I had to post, and I wasn’t very proud of what I was posting. I didn’t like that feeling. It was really taking a toll on me to keep the pace. … It reminded me a lot of cigarettes. There’s something very dark intermingled with social media, where it’s made to be so addictive and endless.

“In its inception, social media was a great thing to connect people, but with what it’s becoming, I think there’s a darkness to it So, I had to find my own peace with it,” Leming continues. “I felt like I was becoming a bad person to be around in real life. My relationship with my family was suffering a lot. I definitely sensed that something was off, that I was giving too much of my energy to this online world and not enough of my energy to my immediate surroundings. That was a real wake-up call. And so that essentially led to the last year where I toured and played a lot of shows, but I wasn’t really online at all. When I needed a break from social media, a lot of [fan adoration and validation] goes away, so there was a period of, ‘Oh, I’m a piece of crap again, and I’m not worthy.’ And that’s still something that’s a daily thing for me. But it was a really beautiful time in my life: I wrote 96 songs for this record!”

Looking back on his Idol experience, which was crazy enough, Leming is thankful that social media wasn’t around in 2008, when 28 million tuned in for his audition episode and 25 million on the night when he was eliminated. “All there was Myspace, basically,” he chuckles. He can only imagine the sort of online reaction — the good, the bad, and the downright vicious — he would have received on other platforms. “Some people have amazingly thick skins. I am not one of those,” he states. “When you get older, you get a little better at it, but I’ve always erred on the sensitive side.”

As for what happened on Leming’s infamous Hollywood Week episode, when the judges thought his seemingly diva-like decision to dismiss the live band and perform alone was a bad look, there was of course a lot more going on behind the scenes that the Idol editors showed. “The big ‘drama’ that happened with me was I ‘kicked the band off the stage.’ And the reason for that was they gave us a packet of approved songs, and I picked Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take Me Out,’” reveals Leming, who’s “always been an Anglophile.” (His buzzy breakout Hollywood Week performance was of Mika’s “Grace Kelly.”) “But at the last minute, they told me I couldn’t do that one; they said, ‘No, we’ve redacted the list,’ or whatever. So, I chose ‘Stand by Me.’ I went in with the band and they wouldn’t change the arrangement at all. They were going to play it their way. And that led to — which was encouraged by the producers of the show — me deciding to go ahead and dismiss the band. I think [producer] Nigel [Lythgoe] stopped the whole recording and came up and was like, ‘Josiah! No!’ — because I was trying to tell [the judges] what had led to me doing that. He stopped me and was like, ‘No, no, no, we don’t do that.’ And then they resumed filming, and I’m a mess, and Simon [Cowell] says he feels bad for me.”

It made for good television at the time, but Leming also made the most of his Idol run. He auditioned with an original composition, “To Run,” which was almost unheard-of back then, and as he notes, “That was the first season when you could play an instrument, which was awesome for me. … And I mean, that did set my career off. I still have a ton of people that come out to my shows who found me through that.”

And Leming learned lessons from that whirlwind experience that have served him well as he’s navigated the business ever since. “I will say one crazy benefit of all of this — and it’s a blessing and a curse, honestly — is I know so much about this damn industry. You could put a contract in front of me right now and I could pretty much negotiate it without a lawyer. I know the ins and outs of this business. I can tell you how crappy those American Idol contracts were. The wealth of knowledge I have now is pretty crazy. Sometimes I wish I knew less, because I might be a little more deer-in-the-headlights and maybe enjoy myself a little bit more,” he laughs.

But perhaps even more importantly, Leming learned how to “stick to my guns and have that conviction. I would say sometimes to a detriment, but usually something I’m very grateful for, is I’ve always been stubborn to the Nth degree. And even when it makes opportunities go away, it’s only going to be a good thing in the long run. Like, I think it’s just one of the coolest things when people find success and you’re like, ‘Hey, where was this person?’ And then you look back at the tape and you see stuff from years ago where they were still that same person. Bernie Sanders is a great example of this — he was that guy back as mayor in Vermont. And I just love that. It’s one of the best feathers in your cap you can have.”

And now that new fans are discovering Josiah and the Bonnevilles all these years later, he realizes that if he’d experienced this kind of success right after Idol, or back when he was on Warner Bros., he wouldn’t have relished it as much — nor would he have been able to mentally handle it.

“Somebody’s looking out for me, let’s put it that way. It’s just come at the sweetest time of my life where I can appreciate it properly and not blow it. I’ve kind of always had an addictive personality, and I just don’t think I would’ve managed it well at all if it had come sooner. I think I would have gone off the rails,” admits Leming, who’s “had quite a bit of problems” in the past and says now he’s “not completely sober, not AA-sober,” but “through therapy and a lot of work” has “gotten to a very good place and a very healthy relationship with everything. So, I’m very thankful that [this success] is happening now.”

And he’s enjoying just the right amount of success, too. “I think from the get-go I’ve been at battle with this industry, because I grew up loving music, but I never thought of it as a product. I never thought about the commercial viability of it,” he stresses. “I always knew this is what I wanted to do with my life, and I wanted it so bad and I was so hungry for it. When I went on American Idol, I think that was clear how much it meant to me. But it never meant so much to me because I felt like I had something to sell. I just wanted to make music and share it. And so, I think the recent realization is I probably don’t want to be a mainstream artist. I probably never wanted to be a mainstream artist, just in the early stages, I was kind of put in a mainstream situation.”

Now that Leming is finally figuring it all out and finding that perfect sweet-spot balance in life, he’s truly grateful for everything happened before, as he releases his greatest album yet. As Is’s title track tells the clearly autobiographical tale of a 33-year-old drifter dusting off an old pawn shop guitar, and another track, “Redline,” is about “taking an old, classic rare engine and putting it in this other car and it gives that new life. And I feel that way,” he says with a soft smile.

“I get emotional even talking about it, because I’ve wanted this thing since I can remember, probably since I was 8 years old when I first started playing a Casio keyboard. I just love that someone like me can have value even though you’re not the shiny new toy anymore. I feel like I’ve been brought back from the dead.”

“On a couple of songs on this album, I tried to write from the same place that I wrote when I was a kid, which was very anti-intellectual,” singer-songwriter and actor Nat Wolff tells LPTV, as he sits with his bandmate and brother, fellow musician/thespian Alex, at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records. “I tried to do a lot of closing my eyes and just feeling the shapes of the piano and the sounds of the piano, not even writing down the chords, not knowing even exactly what I was playing, and letting the songs come to me. That’s how I did it as a kid. … Sometimes it ends up being so embarrassingly bad when you listen back, but then sometimes you discover something really unique that you wouldn’t be able to find otherwise.”

Nat and Alex are at Licorice Pizza — a much more intimate space than the arenas they’ll be playing in May and June with tourmate Alex Warren, or the big stages they graced in 2024 opening for their friend and collaborator Billie Eilish — to play a stripped-down show celebrating their new album. Fittingly and simply Nat & Alex Wolff, the record is one of the best releases of 2026 so far, and certainly the best of their long career — a stunning dreampop opus that evokes everything from ‘70s Laurel Canyon folk, to ‘90s slowcore and shoegaze, to even ‘80’s/’90s Cher. And it’s probably not at all what unfamiliar listeners would expect from child stars of the aughts’ cult Nickelodeon show The Naked Brothers Band.

“I remember someone recently said, ‘Oh, I just saw that you released music. When did you stop being the Naked Brothers Band?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I was about 11,’” the now 28-year-old Alex chuckles.

But starring on three Naked Brothers Band seasons, for which they performed and composed all the music, actually served as a sort of songwriting/production “bootcamp” for the Wolffs — the sons of Thirtysomething actress Polly Draper, who created and directed the Naked Brothers series, and veteran jazz musician Michael Wolff. And it led them to this full-circle moment with their fourth studio album, as they explore and unpack their complicated and conflicted experiences with, among other things, childhood (and adulthood) fame.

“I read a book, and then I was in therapy dealing with some traumatic moments from my adolescence and late childhood, kind of trying to deal with the question of how these little incidents in my childhood are affecting me in my romantic relationships and in my friendships,” says Nat, 31, as he reflects on “Horse,” one of his most raw and confessional contributions to Nat & Alex Wolff. “But it wasn’t really something that I was sharing with anybody. …  I thought, like, ‘Whoa, this is too scary to even show Alex.’ … But now it ends up being the one that I’m the most excited to play and feels the most healing.”

Alex feels the same way about his own (no pun intended) naked “Backup Plan,” a song “that felt different and dangerous and strange.” He wrote it in a hotel room in Athens, Greece, while shooting a movie on location and spending an unprecedented amount of time away from Nat, when “there was nothing else that I could do in that moment except to write about it,” he explains. “Sometimes you want to be more of a journalist of your feelings and kind of be a little bit removed… and that was not the case with that song at all.”

“We definitely missed each other, and also just worried about each other. I remember Alex sending me ‘Backup Plan’ and thinking, like, ‘Oh, I really love this song, and I can’t wait to record it’ — but also, ‘I gotta check in on him.’ Sometimes it’s easier to communicate through the music than it is in any other way,” Nat muses, remembering the time apart before they reconvened to record Nat & Alex Wolff. “I felt the same way playing ‘Horse’ for Alex for the first time. … My hands were shaking, and he’s like, ‘We’ve got to record that tomorrow.’”

The brothers have had their struggles, both during their Nickelodeon run (when they experienced the double-life whiplash of being bullied at school, yet being worshipped by both teenybopper and “creepy older” fans off-campus) and after the series ended in 2009. “We were famous and then not famous and famous and not famous,” Alex quips. And yet, they’ve managed to avoid the rock-bottom scandals of many former child stars, which they attribute to both their tight sibling bond and to the periods of quiet in their professional lives that allowed them to process and regroup.

“I think we were really lucky that we had each other. We watched a lot of people that were kids on shows or in bands just completely self-destruct, and I think having each other, it became ‘us against the world,’” Nat says. “I think especially as musicians and as actors and as artists, having those times where things weren’t ‘happening’ or ‘hot,’ when I look back, those are the times where I made the most growth as an artist by far. It also kind of made us realize that we just need to keep our heads down and keep making the work.”

In the extended LPTV video above and the edited Q&A below — what the brothers sweetly and generously call their “favorite interview ever,” at their “favorite record store” — Nat and Alex open up about the cathartic and rewarding process of crafting their “most collaborative album on every level”; respectively portraying Pavement’s Scott Kannberg and Leonard Cohen onscreen; their “Mount Rushmore” of all-time favorite songwriters; the encouragement they received from family friend Warren Zevon; getting pelted with monkey feces while performing at a rained-out Bronx Zoo; love-bombing; and the very special four-legged guest star on their album, Shark O’Connell.

LPTV: It’s an exciting day. There are already a couple-hundred people lined up outside the store to see you perform. Congratulations! I know this album was made in a different circumstances from previous ones — particularly the one before, Table for Two, when you were literally locked down together during quarantine times. Before this new one, you had spent some time apart. You weren’t estranged, you hadn’t had a feud or anything, but you’d been living in different places. After being in a band together for practically as long as you’d been brothers, I assume it was unprecedented for you to be separated, and that this affected the record.

ALEX: For sure. That was the longest we’d been apart. I was traveling around Europe for a year filming — I was in Norway, I was in Greece, I was in Montreal, I was in Argentina, I was in London. I was really all over the place. And I think that there’s something about writing songs while you’re away and then bringing them back to Nat. It’s like the most amazing, rewarding feeling, because you felt so far away and you’ve sort of been writing to yell out and get back home. And then when you bring it, it feels almost like it was very, very private. But we also did some songs completely together on this album. We did “Tough,” where Nat sings the first verse and I sing the pre-chorus, then we sing the chorus together. I’m really proud of that. I felt like this was the most collaborative album that we made on every level.

NAT: Yeah, there’s something interesting about Alex being far away and me being far away and sending each other songs, almost as a way to check in with each other.

Did you miss each other? Did it feel weird to be apart?

NAT: Oh, yeah! We definitely missed each other, and also just worried about each other. I remember Alex sending me “Backup Plan” and thinking, like, “Oh, I really love this song, and I can’t wait to record it” — but also, “I gotta check in on him.” Sometimes it’s easier to communicate through the music than it is in any other way. I felt the same way playing “Horse” for Alex for the first time. … My hands were shaking, and he’s like, “We’ve got to record that tomorrow.”

Am I correct that “Backup Plan” was the song that sort of kicked things off for this album? And it’s one of the ones that Alex wrote in a hotel?

ALEX: Yeah, in Athens. Definitely for me, that’s the inciting incident that’s it was time to make a new record. We’d been writing songs, but there was something about that song that felt different and dangerous and strange. It demanded to at least follow something through with it and see how it would come out in the studio. I was very nervous to record it, because it felt like I didn’t know what direction really we wanted to go in, because it was very raw. And I think that we felt the same way about “Horse,” where it was so raw that it was almost like, “OK, what do we do with this song? … I don’t know what the fuck we’re going to do with this.”

What were your respective mindsets during “Backup Plan” and “Horse”? What were you each going through when writing two of the most vulnerable songs of your career?

NAT: I read a book and then I was in therapy dealing with some traumatic moments from my adolescence and late childhood, kind of trying to deal with the question of how these little incidents in my childhood are affecting me in my romantic relationships and in my friendships. It was just something that I was thinking about a lot. [“Horse”] was just a byproduct of that, but it wasn’t really something that I was sharing with anybody. So then, showing the song, I thought, like, “Whoa, this is too scary to even show Alex.” But then at a certain point of showing people, now it ends up being the one that I’m the most excited to play and feels the most healing. And it’s been the one that I’ve gotten the most kind of vulnerable take from people who’ve heard it, sharing stories with me.

ALEX: I feel the same way. I feel like [“Backup Plan”] was written in a state of there was nothing else that I could do in that moment except to write about it. Sometimes you want to be more of a journalist of your feelings and kind of be a little bit removed… and that was not the case with that song at all. I was playing Leonard Cohen [in the 2024 drama series So Long, Marianne] and I was really entrenched in the work that [Cohen] was inspired by and Herman Hesse and all those people, so I felt, “OK, I have a lot of information that I’ve inhaled. Hopefully when this explosion comes out, there will be pieces of that stuff.” I think that’s how we sort of approached it, like if it’s a raw song, let’s keep it raw. Use the scratch vocal. The vocal doesn’t sound perfect, but it sounds true.

I hear a lot of Leonard Cohen’s influence on this album. How daunting was it to play one of the greatest artists of all time, in my opinion?

NAT: My opinion too!

ALEX: Yeah, definitely. Probably for me, the favorite songwriter.

NAT: What about Paul [McCartney] and John [Lennon]?

ALEX: It’s like it’s [Cohen] and Paul and John are on the Mount Rushmore of best songwriters, but definitely lyrically [Cohen] is the king for me. And I still feel that he’s underrated, even though he’s huge and important. You can’t talk about him enough. I think in approaching [the role], I just thought, “Well, there’s going to be a huge chunk of people who really don’t like it no matter what I do,” because it’s almost a betrayal that someone else is not actually Leonard Cohen. So, I just felt like I’m just going to accept that, and [tap into] what he meant to me and what I took from him.

And then Nat played Scott Kannberg, aka Spiral Stairs of Pavement, in the recent Pavements movie. I don’t even know how to describe that film. It’s not a documentary, but it’s not a biopic, either.

NAT: Yeah, we didn’t really even know what we were doing when we did it, but they said, “It’s going to be half-biopic, half-you as actors pretending to be like an actor that can’t get out of character.” Like Austin Butler playing Elvis or something. And then it’s a bit of an actual documentary. And then there’s also a musical that they put on Broadway for three days, and they filmed the behind-the-scenes of the musical. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. I saw it in a theater. But then it’s weirdly really moving too. I actually got to sit next to the lead singer of Pavement [Stephen Malkmus] at a fake premiere that we did to make it look like a premiere — they were going to shoot it and then put it in the movie — and he was shaking and crying and stuff, because it’s his life and his legacy. That made me think of how people that have that bratty kind of persona usually are the most sensitive. It’s like a way to block it. I’ve always felt really moved by the Pavement songs and I didn’t know why, and then I was like, “Oh. That’s why.” He’s a really deep-feeling person; he just subverts it in kind of goofiness and wackiness.

I can hear the ‘90s alternative influence in your music too. I hear Elliott Smith, Sebadoh, Beck — but like sad Beck, like Sea Change-era Beck.

ALEX: Oh, we love that! That’s our favorite Beck.

NAT: Nigel Godrich Beck.

There’s also obviously a lot of ‘70 influences on this album.

NAT: Our parents really introduced us to a lot of the late-‘60s and ‘70s music, and then at 12 or 13 I think we rebelled and dove really hard into all the ‘90s grunge — My Bloody Valentine, dreampop, Slowdive. All those kind of bands have meant so much to us, especially production-wise. And lyrically, we love Blur.

ALEX: [Lyndsey] said our clothes look like Oasis!

But unlike the Oasis brothers, you get along.

NAT: Well, we had a couple of fights about the album…

ALEX: I feel with an album, you can hear the compromise if you don’t battle it out a little bit. I feel like when you really love an album between two people, you can tell they both had a point of view.

NAT: The problem was is that one day Alex got the talk-back mic in the studio and I was playing a piano part, and he was giving me notes on the piano part. And as soon as I heard Alex’s voice of God in my ears, in the headphones, I thought, “This is not going to work for me.”

Are there songs that were particularly points of contention?

ALEX: I can’t say that there was one song on the album that while we were in the studio we weren’t getting along making it. I felt like that was the magic. It’s more about after and mixing. I feel like if there was any song that we weren’t both totally 100 percent sold on, it’s just not on the fucking album. That was our rule.

NAT: It was more like, what were the songs that we were going to cut? What were the songs that are going to be on? It’s hard, because there’s a lot of songs that didn’t make it, but it wasn’t even because these songs are better than other songs. It was more like, “This is the most cohesive album.” The album has lots of ups and downs and different colors and isn’t one thing; I’m bothered by a lot of modern music when an album just has a uniform sound. All my favorite albums take lots of journeys, and we wanted to make sure that it has our imprint on it, but that it takes on lots of different shapes.

You mentioned that you rebelled against your parents. But your father is an amazing jazz musician, Michael Wolff, and he was the bandleader and musical director for The Arsenio Hall Show! So, I imagine you met some very cool people as kids. I understand that you sort of grew up with Warren Zevon.

NAT: Oh, yeah, Warren Zevon was my huge influence ,and he was my dad’s best friend. He died when I was probably like 8, but actually for my fifth birthday he gave me a little leather jacket and he said, “You’re going to be a rock star.”

And he was right! Warren was right about a lot of things, actually. What did you think of his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction that finally happened last year?

ALEX: So awesome. So great. So moving.

NAT: His last album that he did right before he died [The Wind], where he brought in Bruce Springsteen and all these people and he did “Keep Me In Your Heart” — oh my God, that’s the most beautiful song you ever. My dad used to always say, and he still always says when he’s sick or feeling bad or something, “Oh, my shit’s fucked-up.” And then Warren wrote a song based on my dad saying that. It’s a great one, one of my favorite songs. … He was such an amazing lyricist, it’s crazy.

ALEX: Yeah, he’s on the Mount Rushmore of lyricists, for sure.

So, your Mount Rushmore is Warren Zevon, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney? How many are allowed?

ALEX: Neil Young? Can John and Paul be one [spot]? OK, thenalsoBob Dylan…

NAT: And Joni [Mitchell], oh my God!

That’s a pretty solid top five. So yes, you came from a musical family, a showbiz family, growing up with this music, and you weren’t brothers very long before you became a band. And it’s interesting, because we were talking about the Pavements mockumentary, but if people look back at your mockumentary-style Naked Brothers Band show, it was pretty smart for a children’s program. It was pretty meta. I don’t even know how much younger viewers understood how sophisticated it was, especially for the time.

NAT: We didn’t even understand!

ALEX: I don’t think I knew that it was really making fun of us until much later.

NAT: But I did feel when we did an episode where we went to the VMAs, we’re supposed to win the VMA, and we hadn’t even been on TV yet and the music hadn’t even come out yet. We started to leave the VMAs and we got into a car to go home, and [cast member] Qaasim [Middleton] goes, “But what about our award?” And then I was like, “Dude, this is just a show.” That’s when it kind of hit.

ALEX: We met Fergie [at the VMAs] and she said, “I’m a big fan,” but she was just being really nice and polite.

There are other TV shows that began this prefab-band tradition, especially The Monkees. The Monkees were a TV band before they were a “real band,” and some people still don’t take them seriously as a real band, because they still have never been nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. You’ve probably dealt with that skepticism yourself, but maybe it’s less of an issue for you guys because you are no longer called “The Naked Brothers Band,” which gives you a clean slate.

NAT: We wanted to break out and just be “Nat & Alex Wolff,” because it wasn’t the Naked Brothers Band. It wasn’t that group. It was us. … And it’s been interesting that ever since we’ve been making music as Nat & Alex, it’s never been an issue for people to wrap their minds around it. We’ve always been really, really lucky with musicians, producers, and people like that who understand where the music’s coming from. But I do remember with press and journalists, having to steer the ship. They were trying to pigeonhole us into a certain thing that we weren’t.

ALEX: I remember someone recently said, “Oh, I just saw that you released music. When did you stop being the Naked Brothers Band?” And I was like, “Oh, I was about 11.”

It’s crazy that the show ended more than 20 years ago! I know you had to write several songs for each episode, so it seems like it was a good songwriting bootcamp to help you with the career you have now.

NAT: It was a bootcamp for songwriting, and then it’s how we learned the studio. We started off where we would sing and play our songs, and then we had musicians come in and we’d play with them. But by the end of the show, Alex and I were doing everything in the studio. … We were kind of already writing all the songs, and now recording them basically a duo.

ALEX: I was just a drummer, initially, and then we started to become more of a duo.

When we were talking about the song “Horse,” Nat, you alluded to traumatic experiences in your adolescence. Do you mean the whole child-stardom thing? Unlike some other kid stars or TV stars or Disney stars or Nickelodeon stars of your era, I don’t recall hearing about you two going through any big scandals or struggles.

NAT: I think we were really lucky that we had each other. We watched a lot of people that were kids on shows or in bands just completely self-destruct, and I think having each other, it became “us against the world.” There were times when it was really overwhelming, having a lot of people know who you are and kind of getting bullied at school, but then having crowds of people outside of the school screaming. It was just a really strange time. And then it kind of going away and then touring, and going from playing the Bronx Zoo for 10 people to then playing Madison Square Garden and Irving Plaza…

The Bronx Zoo concert sounds kind of lit, though.

ALEX: Nope! No, bro. We were right by the monkeys — the real monkeys, not the [Monkees] — and they were throwing fecal matter at our guitars.

NAT: We’d learned all these songs because this choir was going to come, and then only two people from the choir showed up.

ALEX: And they didn’t know any of the songs that they told us to learn.

This is like an episode of a TV show, almost.

ALEX: A tragedy. A horror movie.

NAT: I remember turning Alex and being like, “I don’t think it could get worse” than that show. And honestly, and it never did.

That’s like Spinal Tap. It’s maybe even worse than “Puppet Show with Spinal Tap.” Instead, it’s “Monkeys with Nat & Alex Wolff.”

ALEX: I just feel bad for the eight or nine fans who did come to that show and were like, “What the hell?”

Well, I don’t think you should feel bad for them now. Now they’re probably like, “Remember that show at the Bronx Zoo? We were there!”

NAT: Oh — and it was raining so hard that they put up a half a tent just over the stage. But everybody who came was just getting rained on really hard.

I bet the monkeys enjoyed the show, though.

ALEX: Nope, clearly not!

I mean, maybe monkeys throwing feces is like Greeks throwing plates. It’s a sign of affection and applause.

ALEX: Opa!

But at least you don’t have to play zoos anymore.

NAT: Well, maybe we should, A zoo tour could actually be fun.

Anyway, more seriously, your childhood is a recurring theme on this album. I know “Whole Other Life” unpacks some of that. But I don’t know if it is only about being famous at a young age, or if it’s about other stuff.

ALEX: I think that we were famous and then not famous and famous and not famous, and that can come and go. But it’s more about the after-effect. I feel like when it’s happening, all that stuff was great. It was just really complicated after — your feelings of trying to fit in and your relationship with family members. Nat told the story of how we were in school and we would be getting bullied, but then we’d walk outside and there’d be fans there. And there’d be creepy older people. It was just a lot of strange shit for young people to endure. A lot of amazing stuff, and a lot of shitty stuff, especially when you’re a child star and then you move on. I mean, if you can call us child stars; some people like Miley Cyrus or whatever, that was just so insane. But being famous, I think that you want to almost pretend that you get embarrassed by it. You don’t want to even look at it. And then when you get a little bit older, not only are you OK to look at it, you can kind of feel it again and understand what it was that you were going through at the time.

NAT: On a couple of songs on this album, I tried to write from the same place that I wrote when I was a kid, which was very anti-intellectual. … I tried to do a lot of closing my eyes and just feeling the shapes of the piano and the sounds of the piano, not even writing down the chords, not knowing even exactly what I was playing, and letting the songs come to me. That’s how I did it as a kid. And somehow it does unlock a certain self-consciousness that goes [away], and you have the ability to be free. Maybe it’s because you’re not trying to be good, so you can be free. Then you end up stumbling upon stuff. Sometimes it ends up being so embarrassingly bad when you listen back, but then sometimes you discover something really unique that you wouldn’t be able to find otherwise.

Do you think it was a blessing in disguise that there were ebbs and flows to your career? I’ve heard this theory that the age at which someone becomes famous is when their maturity level freezes…

ALEX: People say my maturity level is about 8!

NAT: Something froze there.

Well, I beg to differ. You both seem very mature and grounded to me. But do you think the fact that you had periods of relative normalcy after your TV show ended was a good thing in the long run?

NAT: Totally. Because I think especially as musicians and as actors and as artists, having those times where things weren’t “happening” or “hot,” when I look back, those are the times where I made the most growth as an artist by far. It also kind of made us realize that we just need to keep our heads down and keep making the work.

I have a couple of other songs I’d love to discuss. My favorite track on the album is “Candy Speak.” It’s about love-bombing, which has happened to us all. “Forever for about a week” is best line ever. I don’t know if this song is based on a real-life experience or amalgam of experiences, but I can relate.

NAT: It was an amalgamation of a few. It’s definitely that feeling of not just being love-bombed, but buying into the fantasy because it’s nice for that moment. You know somewhere in the back of your head that this isn’t real. If it feels too good to be true, it’s usually too good to be true.

But yes, it feels good to be love-bombed, so you think, “I’m just going to go with it, and worry about that later.”

NAT: It’s like doing a drug or drinking too much. You’re like, “This feels so good! It’s going to last forever!” But the hangover’s comin’, man. It’s comin’.

It’s relatable content, for sure. The other song I wanted to ask more about was “Tough,” which opens the record, because that’s a particularly emotional one.

ALEX: I had listened to Alex G’s new album Headlights and I’d really loved it, and then I’d gone down a really a deep rabbit hole with Cher. I love Cher a lot. … Cher is the greatest chorus-writer ever. So, I just wanted to kind of capture that feeling I had when I listened to Headlights, and then capture the feeling I have when I listen to a Cher chorus. I went in the yard and I wrote that chorus and then kind of wrote a pre-chorus, but I didn’t really know what it was. And then Nat and I went to the studio for the very first time, having sections of the song not written, like writing it on the day. And it was the most thrilling thing in the world.

NAT: All the things we’ve been talking about in this interview — about growing up and that sort of face that you have to put on in order to have that weird childhood that we had — that, I think, came through in those lyrics. “Empty compliments/That’s what I do best/The days just do that/I got no candy left.”

The last song I want to ask about is “Soft Kissing Hour,” because it obviously has a very special guest on it: Billie Eilish’s dog.

NAT: Hey, I was going to make that joke! … Yeah, Shark is on a lot of tracks on that song. … His snoring is kind of comforting. It’s just way in the back, but I remember the mixer being like, “Should I take out all this noise?” I was like, “Nope!” And he said that’s what happened with Carrie & Lowell, the Sufjan Stevens album. He’d spent two weeks taking out all the air-conditioning noise, and Suf said, “What happened to the air-conditioning?”

I guess you kept what some people would call “mistakes” on this record, and you kept it organic and DIY and kind of went back to your roots. And it all worked out. There were no mistakes. So, congratulations again on a fantastic album.

In his new bombshell autobiography, Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself, pop singer David Archuleta writes with heartbreaking candor — admitting that at times he even wept while typing — about his life-long battles with poor self-esteem, extreme people-pleasing, scrupulosity (a subtype of OCD characterized by religious obsession), guilt and denial regarding his closeted queerness, and eventually suicidal ideation, before he finally came out at age 30 and then left the Mormon church.

But he says the two topics that were the most difficult for him to write about were actually his ”terrifying” run on American Idol (memories of which he’d almost entirely blocked out) and his fraught relationship with his notorious father and “dadager,” Jeff Archuleta.

“I had not yet processed my time on American Idol, which I think I associate a lot with my relationship with my dad,” he explains softly.

Back in 2008, when David was a frontrunner on Idol and the show still dominated pop culture, Jeff practically made TMZ and VoteForTheWorst.com headlines more often than David did — all about being him an overbearing “stage dad” who quickly created enemies on the Idol set (and was even ultimately banned from the set). And Devout reveals that such gossip was actually true. A man with deferred dreams of his own greatness, Jeff forced his talented but extremely shy child into the spotlight — dragging David from Utah to Los Angeles (where they often slept in parked cars instead of hotel rooms) to audition for Star Search and loiter in hotel lobbies hoping to network with American Idol Season 1 contestants and executives.

Such aggressive tactics actually worked, and David ended up competing on Idol Season 7, when he was just 16, making it all the way to second place. But David resented his controlling father’s pushiness and manipulation (as did the rest of the Archuleta family; Jeff’s laser-focus on his son’s singing career alienated not only David’s four siblings, but David’s own adored mother, Lupe). It was understandably stressful for someone so young and introverted to perform for votes on national TV while fearing he’d be “exposed” for being different and effeminate; to feel responsible for fulfilling his dad’s ambitions; to feel pressured to be a Mormon posterboy; and to eventually become the family’s breadwinner, after he signed a deal with Jive Records and continued to be managed by Jeff. It was only many years later, when a Mormon church elder warned David that he was being emotionally abused by his father and advised that David go no-contact, that David realized how extreme the situation truly was.

However, it was when writing Devout (which he was inspired to do by his good friend, former child star and I’m Glad My Mom Died memoirist Jeanette McCurdy) that David finally unpacked the secret that lay at the heart of his familial dysfunction. “[Jeff] was wrongly accused of things in my family that I didn’t really get a clear picture on until I was older, putting everything together and realizing, ‘This is a messy situation. This is complex,’” he says.

When David was 9 years old, a vindictive family friend on Lupe’s side falsely accused Jeff of sexually molesting David’s sisters, which had tragic, lasting ramifications for the entire family — especially for David, who came to fear and mistrust his father for years, long after Jeff was exonerated. And while David may never forgive the people who spread these vicious lies (as he discusses this family scandal during his Lyndsanity interview, his anger is evident), by writing Devout, he came to understand Jeff’s trauma… and forgive his father.

In the emotional video interview above and text Q&A below, David also opens up about watching his American Idol episodes for the first time in years and feeling newfound compassion for his younger self; how his fellow Season 7 contestant, the openly queer Adore Delano, made him “so seen and safe” during his Idol experience; and how he finally started living for himself at the late-blooming age of 30.

LYNDSANITY: We’ve done a lot of interviews in the five years since you came out and reinvented yourself professionally and personally. But as I found out from reading this book, you’d lived nine lives before that happened. You lived several lives even before American Idol. But it seems like you really started living at age 30.

DAVID ARCHULETA: It very much was like starting life again. In ways I was a late bloomer, but in other ways a lot of life had already been lived. There’s a lot of challenges. There’s a lot of public knowledge of parts of my life, while other parts I felt like I had to do everything to hide. Not just my family dynamics, but hiding from myself, with trying to figure out whether I was gay or not, and landing on bisexual — I just say “queer” now, to be broader, but it’s basically bisexual — and just feeling like I always had to live my life for someone else, for someone else’s approval. “Are you giving me the OK? Did I do this right?” I guess it was performative. Always performing. And I guess I never turned the performative part off until I reached my thirties. It was kind of like learning how to just finally exhale, after holding your breath for so long, and just saying, “OK, what’s it like to just be myself, regardless of what others may think of that?”

And it’s terrifying. It’s scary, because up until then, my whole identity was, “Do you like me? Do you approve of who I am? I will do whatever I need, I will be whoever you need me to be, in order to be accepted by you and approved by you and to be told, ‘Good job.’” To turn that off was terrifying, because I didn’t know how to live my life in another way.That’s why it was like restarting, because it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to live my life based off of what feels right to me.” Something I never believed I could trust, really. But yeah, it’s been so fun and exciting to just live. I feel so excited about life. Before, I was always so afraid of life.

Yes, a recurring theme in this book is you were a people-pleaser, whether you were trying to gain the approval of the Mormon church, American Idol voters, or especially your dad. As I said, I’ve interviewed you several times in recent years, mostly about either your sexuality or your changing relationship with religion, which are of course big focuses of Devout. But today, I want to talk about what you say were your two hardest things to write about: your father and American Idol. I’ll start by asking, why was that the case?

It’s probably because I already processed my sexuality, but I hadn’t yet processed the dynamic with my dad. And I had not yet processed my time on American Idol, which I think I associate a lot with my relationship with my dad. The way I coped to move forward with my life was simply to cut out a lot of that. Originally I didn’t [write] as much about American Idol [in Devout]; I talked more about my family dynamics and my religion, my growing up in Utah. And the publishers were like, “Hey, we would really love for you to talk more about your time on American Idol.” And it was just very uncomfortable.

I’m not saying it was a horrible experience. It was just extremely uncomfortable to go through. So, I went back and rewatched all of my American Idol episodes, and I experienced the cringe — but mixed with the cringe, this time I was feeling something new, which was compassion for the teenager that was there on that stage feeling so exposed, so uncomfortable, and really terrified. I mean, I was terrified to be on there, because I was so afraid of people seeing me for the “problem” that I was, that I thought I was. I mean, at the time, it was the problem that I was.

Do you mean people thinking you were a sissy? I’ll use the term “sissy” instead of a meaner one, but do you mean outing you, or figuring out what you maybe hadn’t even figured out about yourself yet?

Yeah, exactly. I think people labeling and deciding what I was, before I even understood what it was. It felt, again, like a loss of control — that I didn’t have control over the pacing of my life. I think that’s what was hard about American Idol. I was being forced to move at a much quicker pace than I was ready for. But I still did it because I didn’t want to disappoint anyone and I didn’t want to let people down, especially my dad. It was everything for him that I was there. He felt like I was finally experiencing what he always knew about me. He’s like, “David, you are one of the best singers in the world!” I was like, “Oh my God, Dad. There are plenty of singers out there. There’s Celine Dion, there’s Whitney Houston, there’s Mariah Carey, there’s Stevie Wonder. I’m not one of the greatest singers in the world!” But doing so well on that show for my dad was just like, “See what I told you? Didn’t I tell you?”

The irony is, even though Jeff was such a taskmaker that he made you almost hate music at times, like he sucked the joy out of it for you, you still do music for a living now. And you seem to enjoy it more than ever. And your whole music career might not have happened if Jeff hadn’t been such an aggressive stage dad. So, yeah, in some ways he was “right” to do what he did. How do you come to terms with all that? You must feel quite torn.

You are so right. And that’s a great observation that you’ve made. There’s a lot of resentment that I had had for my dad, but I couldn’t help but acknowledge that if it weren’t for his hardheadedness and his stubbornness and intensity… I’m a much more gentle personality. I’m a lot more passive. I’m still intense and passionate, but as far as my convictions, they just were not anywhere near the same level as where my dad’s were. He believed that I deserved to have success, and he believed that he deserved to see success from his son.

I didn’t have that same fire. I didn’t have that same drive. I wasn’t as motivated. I was just kind of fine to go with the flow. That’s just how I had always been. I did love music, but I was very shy. I was shy to sing in front of people, and my dad always pushed me to sing for people. I hated him for it, I resented it, and yet it taught me to go out of my comfort zone and take risks and do things that I didn’t always feel like doing because I didn’t feel like I was capable of doing it. It’s not necessarily that I didn’t want to sing. I just didn’t think I was good enough. I didn’t think I had the personality. I didn’t think I had the talent, abilities. I just questioned myself and second-guessed myself way too much to really do anything about it, whereas my dad was like, “No, we are doing this!” …That’s exactly what my dad was for me. To make it, especially in the entertainment industry, you need that.

Well, he got the ball rolling and put you on a path you might not have been on otherwise, but even after Idol, him being your manager created problems. Are there ways that he might’ve sabotaged you professionally — maybe that you didn’t even realize until later — where you feel like your career might’ve turned out differently if he hadn’t been in the picture?

Absolutely. I feel like while he helped start the first momentum for my career, he had very much an us-against-the-world mentality. It’s “us-against-them,” which I think stems from how we were raised with our beliefs … always being taught that the entertainment industry was “evil.” I think he was just kind of waiting to see all the “evil” people, so he treated everyone as if they were evil. “These are bad people who want something. They probably want to take advantage of my son.” And there are probably a lot of people who did. But I think at the same time, my dad didn’t realize that he, of all people, was the one who was taking the most advantage of me.

And I think because he was my dad, he thought, “Well, this is my son. I know what’s best for him, and I only want the best for him.” It’s like his vision was blurred by that sentiment, to not realize that a lot of my grief was coming from my dynamic with him and the way he was treating me, and how he didn’t recognize his own greed in some of those moments. And I don’t think he’s even in a place to recognize all of that, because in his eyes, he was just a dad trying to protect his son.

I assume he’s read your book by now.

No, he hasn’t. I’ll send one to him today. I’m actually sending all my copies out today.

Wow. I mean, Devout isn’t completely bashing Jeff, but you really go there. I actually surprised how much you went there. I thought you’d focus more on either your American Idol era or your post-coming out era, but I’d say the core of Devout is about your unhealthy family dynamic, namely with your father. I’m shocked that he hasn’t read it yet. How do you think he’s going to react?

I wanted to finish my story and publish it without any exterior influence on what my story is. I’ve been told many times what my story is and isn’t by others, and I did not want anyone distracting me from that. I knew my dad would have heavy opinions about it, because his perspective is different from mine. I’ve heard his perspective many times; it’s time for me to share mine. I’ve tried to share my perspective with him before, and he would get too defensive. He would feel like I was attacking him, so he wouldn’t hear me. He would speak over me. He felt a need to protect himself from the accusations he felt I was making against him. And my dad, he has trauma with accusations. He was wrongly accused of things in my family that I didn’t really get a clear picture on until I was older, putting everything together and realizing, “This is a messy situation. This is complex.’”

Just to make it very clear, your dad was falsely accused of child molestation, but it broke my heart to read that you always wondered back in the back of your mind, “Is my dad a bad guy? Is there any truth to this?” Has Jeff been given any heads up about how deep you go into all this in your book?

Well, part of the legal aspect of writing this book is like, “Hey, you say a lot of heavy things about your dad, and this could be really serious.” So, my collaborator Val [Valerie Frankel] joined me on a call and recorded a conversation I had with my dad and one of my sisters. I was really worried because I thought, “My dad does not want to talk about this. He’s moved on from this.” This is like 20 years ago that this happened. It’s not always the healthiest thing to go back and dig up the past. But I felt like this was necessary in order to find relief for my sisters, especially my older sister. She wasn’t the one on the call, but she was the one who was wrongly labeled as a victim of my dad, when it was actually someone else [in the family] who she was a victim of. And when she spoke up for herself, which I was so proud of her for doing, when she was young, she was silenced, because people were like, “Oh, you didn’t say what we wanted you to say.” And then for my other sister to have been bribed with a doll, trying to get her to talk poorly about my dad… she didn’t understand why.

When I was writing the book, I had to retract a lot of things because it was too much, and just for legal purposes. But I encountered some of the people in that circle of my family, like family and friends that were close to my mom and her side that kind of instigated all this, and I was just like, “I just am trying to understand. You were all so set on what my dad did. Can you give me some clarity? When did this happen? What did you see that made you convince 9-year-old me that I had to be on your side to get my dad into prison? Because that’s really affected me psychologically.” And it did affect me psychologically. I think the biggest thing that people saw on my time on American Idol was me being afraid of my dad — that narrative. And I was still processing it as a 9-year-old, because I didn’t get to really fully process it.

I didn’t understand what was bad about my dad. I just knew that touch was bad. So, if my dad touched me, if he would just put his hand on my shoulder, I thought that was bad. And that’s really the most he ever did to me physically. If he was standing by me, I just thought, “Don’t touch me.” It really messed with me psychologically. Now I’m finally in my thirties confronting these people, and I was just like, “What did you see that caused you to be so concerned?” And they said, “Oh, we actually didn’t see anything.” I was so pissed off. Fucking pissed. I was like, “You realize you destroyed our family, because you convinced us that we needed to look at our dad as if he were a monster!” And it was like, “Well, your dad was this way and he’s rude and he was insulting.” And I was like, “That does not justify accusing him of child molestation. He can be an asshole. He’s a jerk. He says crass things. He doesn’t respect people’s feelings. He says a lot of very rude things. We can acknowledge that that is a problem and that he can be manipulative and he can be controlling. But that does not justify accusing him of being a child molester.” It doesn’t.

Of course.

And when I saw the way that accountability was deflected, I was so mad. I was like, “You guys let us believe that for decades!”

I’m mad for you and for your family, just hearing about this!

And their answer was, “Well, God knows our hearts, and God’s the judge.” And I’m like, “I don’t think this is God knowing your heart was in the right place, because what you did was wrong, and you’re not willing to own up to that what you did was horrible.”

Have the people who started this chain of false accusations read the book? Do they know that you’re …

Everyone I talk about knows I talk about them. And a lot of them aren’t happy about it. But when I told my dad, I was like, “Dad, I need to get some information about this. I don’t know if this is too touchy of a subject, but I talk about the accusations that were made about you by some of the circle of our family and family friends.” My dad said, “I would actually love to talk about this. I felt like no one ever asked about my experience with that.” And we didn’t [talk about it back then], because the attitude was just, “Let’s just move on, let’s forgive and forget.” And so, my dad was relieved to talk about it now.

I interviewed my mom as well. My mom was just like, “David, why do you feel like you have to talk about this?” It was a very traumatizing experience for her. She didn’t know who to believe. There were two sides of people she loved and trusted, and they were contradicting each other. And she’s like, “Do I side with my circle of my people that I grew up with, or do I side with my husband?” It was very difficult for her to know what to do, and it broke her. She just shut down, and she didn’t recover from that for years. The marriage wasn’t the same after that. My mom basically was just checked-out. She stopped. She was in bed so much of the time. Her depression was really heavy.

And after that, my dad had a lot of frustration. It wasn’t until then that my relationship with my dad became complicated. Before that, he was just my dad. I loved him. We got along really well. There wasn’t this weird dynamic between me and my singing. It just felt like normal. I think my dad became more obsessed with my career and my singing when he needed an escape and an outlet from watching that his family was falling apart and knowing it was probably never going to recover. That’s when he started taking me to California and chasing this dream.

But at that point, my mom was like me: She was confused and she didn’t know what to believe. And no one ever listened to my sisters. So, it wasn’t until my thirties that my mom finally got clarity too about what happened. When I was first writing the book and talking to my mom about it, she’s like, “Well, I guess we’ll never know.” I was like, “Mom, you’ve heard [David’s older sister] Claudia. You’ve heard [David’s younger sister] Jazzy. You should talk to them again, hear their story.” And she did. It was really hard for my mom to revisit because she was just like, “If I learned the truth, it means that my family and my family friends were lying to me.” I think my mom never wanted to have to come to terms to that. But she finally was just like, “I realize I need to be there for my children. And if it means making it a messier dynamic with the people I always grew up with and loved, so be it.”

It was hard. But this all happened while I was writing the book. … When I first started writing, I didn’t know. I was like, “I still don’t know if my dad molested my sisters or not.” And I talked to my sisters and I was like, “Well, Claudia’s always said that Dad never did anything to her, but maybe she was hypnotized or something.” But if [my family] really cared about my sister being a victim, they would care about who she did remember touching her and the multiple accounts that she does remember of [her actual molester]. … Oh my God, I was just so pissed off. So pissed off.

I can hear and see your anger, and I don’t blame you. But you did finally get some answers. You got closure. And I know you were or no- or low-contact with your father for some time, and maybe you still aren’t the best of friends, but I was very pleasantly surprised to read about your dad’s reaction when you came out five years ago. I would’ve expected him to be livid, or say you’re ruining your career, but he was actually super-supportive. That was the absolute opposite of what I would’ve expected from him, and maybe of what you would’ve expected. That’s pretty huge.

Right. At that point, I had not been talking to my dad for a few years. And I think those boundaries were what we needed. We needed to have space to grow away from the toxic codependency that we had in our relationship. Having that space allowed him to become his own person. It allowed me to become my own person. … And just for my dad to only have positive things to say — to say, “I’m proud of you, son, and I support you” — it made me realize that my dad isn’t who I thought he was when I was younger. I thought he just was there to put me down and degrade me and think the worst of me all the time. And that wasn’t the case.

He just was a hurt person at the time. He had a lot to figure out during American Idol. My dad didn’t have a lot of close friends that he could talk to. His family was falling apart. My mom had left right before American Idol; she only came back because the kids needed someone to be there at the home [while I was in Los Angeles doing the show]. But my mom had wanted out of the marriage for a while. My dad’s best friend died while I was on American Idol, too, and that tore him up. And I think it just made him dive even more into getting lost in the world of David.

photo: Joseph Adivari

Your father didn’t always do things right, but as I said, he did put you on Idol, which changed your life in so many ways. In fact, the first LGBTQ+ person you ever discussed homosexuality with was one of your fellow Idol contestants. She’s now known as Adore Delano, who found much greater fame on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and has since transitioned. But as you clarify in your book, you spoke with her and she gave you permission to refer to her in context as Danny Noriega, which was her name when she competed on American Idol Season 7. And Danny was very out, very opposite of the childhood you’d had. I think for a lot of kids watching at home, seeing someone like Danny Noriega make the top 16 on a mainstream TV show was a big deal. And meeting her made a big impression on you as well.

Yeah. I was very devout, focused on my beliefs, Mormon at the time. And Danny was a year older than me. And so, with Adore, I saw her life and I thought, “That’s wrong.” And yet at the time I was like, “I feel so seen and safe with this person. I don’t even understand why.” I didn’t understand that I could relate to an extent of what her experience was, to an extent of being misunderstood for your sexuality or your identity. We both could relate to each other, but I felt like I could somewhat pass and blend in. Danny couldn’t. Adore couldn’t. Adore was a lot more flamboyant naturally than I was. She couldn’t hide. She just had to be herself. She had to get bullied. She had to get the brunt of it. She had to get called all kinds of names to her face all the time. And she learned how to be tough and to fight. In school, she would get in a lot of fights because of it, but it’s because she was just like, “I’m not going to let other people tell me what I am. I’m not going to let them decide whether I am worthy of being here or not.”

I admired that so much, because I was letting everyone decide for me. I was hiding. I was doing everything I could to be what I wasn’t. And I didn’t understand the scope of that; I didn’t understand it at the time and who I was. I was in very much denial, which is why I didn’t understand why I related to Adore. I just knew I could let my guard down with her. And yeah, I’m so grateful. She didn’t pressure me. She didn’t try to push me. I think sometimes people feel like, “A-ha! I knew [that David Archuleta was queer]!” And it’s like, OK, cool. I didn’t. I needed my time to figure that out.

I’m so glad you did.

Thank you!

On that American Idol season, George Michael performed on the finale. By then he was out, and now he’s considered an LGBTQ+ pioneer. But he had been outed in a way that at the time was considered disgraceful and scandalous. Do you have any memories of George that day? Did he make an impression on you?

Unfortunately, George didn’t allow any of us to be on the stage, and he didn’t even want us on the stage with him when we were singing his songs. He wanted everyone off the stage by the time he was there. He did not want to interact with any of us; I don’t know why. So, I didn’t really think anything of him [back then]. I didn’t really know his music and I didn’t really appreciate him. I didn’t think too much else of it because I was just like, “OK, this guy doesn’t want to even interact with us on our show.” It wasn’t until I came out that I really became a fan of George Michael and appreciated his music, his message, his journey, what he had to go through with the public scrutiny. At a time when it wasn’t yet accepted, he was bold to be himself. I went back and listened to his music and I was just like, “Oh, this makes so much sense now.” It spoke to me, and it was the motivation I needed. I played “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” on repeat, as well as “The Voice Within” by Christina Aguilera, the day I came out. They just became my anthems.

Well, what George Michael’s music did for you when you were beginning your coming-out journey, maybe your music can do that for someone now. I think your story is going to help a lot of people.

Thank you. I hope so. I hope it’s encouraging for somebody out there. That’s the whole goal.

This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Robert Smith watches the ‘Later… with Jools Holland’ performance that launched KT Tunstall’s career.

Twenty years ago, on Feb. 7, 2006, Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall released her debut album, Eye to the Telescope, in America. Three months later, runner-up Katharine McPhee covered the LP’s first single, “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” on American Idol Season 5, which was the top-rated show of 2005-2006, averaging more than 30 million viewers a night.

McPhee actually performed Tunstall’s relatively obscure folk song on two of those nights: on the top five episode, and as a reprise for the top two finale. It was an unexpected song choice, back when female pop contestants still mostly stuck to Mariah, Whitney, and Celine ballads, and McPhee’s breakout performance subsequently catapulted “Black Horse” from the bottom half of the Billboard Hot 100 all the way to the top 20.

“It suddenly changed America for me,” says Tunstall, speaking onstage at the Grammy Museum. She notes that she did eventually get to meet McPhee. “And I did say thank you!”

One American artist that Tunstall still hasn’t had the chance to thank, however, is Nas. The hip-hop star was accidentally instrumental in securing Tunstall some “Black Horse” television exposure on the other side of the pond, which was even more important to her then-fledgling career.

Tunstall says it “completely changed [her] life overnight” when she appeared on Britain’s in-the-round variety series Later… with Jools Holland, as a last-minute booking after Nas canceled. “The rapper pulled out, and I got his spot. Obvious choice!” she chuckles.

“I had 24 hours’ notice to get down to London and do it,” Tunstall recalls. The fact that she was a “portable” one-woman show, utilizing loop pedals to create a layered, full-band sound in real time, made it easy for her to pack up quickly and accept the BBC’s invitation. But she had no idea that her looping would make her such a TV sensation.

“I’d been doing it for a bit, like for maybe six months, playing in coffee shops and setting it up myself. Everyone would kind of look up from their lattes and be like, ‘All right, that’s cool,’ but no one was going crazy,” she shrugs.

The next day, “after trying to get somewhere for 10 years, all through my twenties — I was just really lucky that I looked 15 when I was 29,” Tunstall found herself at BBC Studioworks’ Television Centre, sharing that hallowed circular stage with music’s greats. “It was Anita Baker, Jackson Browne, and the Cure… and me! It was crazy.”

The Jools crew then made the brilliant decision to include an over-the-shoulder camera angle of  Robert Smith standing in iconic “Boys Don’t Cry”-style silhouette, as the Cure frontman observed Tunstall’s career-making performance with intense interest. “You could see me through Robert Smith’s hair,” Tunstall laughs. “It was like I was a little egg in a nest.”

Afterwards, Tunstall was still in shock, as she processed what had just happened and tried to make small-talk with Smith. “He was the first famous person I ever met. After the show he was so nice, and he gave me a quote for my press release about how much he loved the performance. And I was just completely overwhelmed and didn’t know what to say to him,” she recalls. “I was trying to think of what to say to him, so I said, ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m going to my parents for lunch.’ I didn’t know what to say next, so I said, ‘What do your mom and dad think of your hair and your lipstick and everything?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I don’t usually put that on when I go home.’ Incognito — much like Stevie Nicks, he can disappear. So, if you saw Robert Smith without, you would not know that was him. It’s genius!”

KT Tunstall chats with Lyndsey Parker at the Grammy Museum about her career. (Photo by Rebecca Sapp, courtesy of the Recording Academy/Getty Images)

After Jools and Robert Smith’s endorsement, Tunstall’s website, which she was still running on her own, “totally exploded,” receiving hundreds of messages a day from new fans. “My favorite email I got was from this guy who said, ‘I’m fiftysomething. I can’t tell my friends that I’m sending you a message because I’m a punk. I just need to tell you that I love your music. I can’t tell anyone else.’”

Adding another twist to this story of happy TV accidents was the fact that Tunstall’s just-completed but not-yet-released Eye to the Telescope didn’t even originally include “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” because it had been written after the LP was recorded. “The Jools Holland scouts had come to see me at rehearsal… and my label boss was like, ‘Play that new one.’ I was like, ‘OK,’ and that was that. I didn’t hear anything from them. Then when it came to the show, my label boss said, ‘Play that ‘woo-hoo’ thing,’ and I said, ‘But it’s not on the record!’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

Tunstall reluctantly complied, but she admits that she “thought it was a terrible mistake” at the time. “I was like, ‘Why on Earth wouldn’t I play the single from the record?’ Obviously, it went mental, so he made a great call with that song. And so, the first 10,000 copies of [Eye to the Telescope] have the audio from the TV show, because they rush-released the album and we didn’t have a recording.” The official studio version that appeared on later pressings of Eye to the Telescope was named Best Single of 2005 by Q magazine, and received a Best Female Pop Vocal Performance nomination at the 2007 Grammy Awards.

Tunstall’s Jools performance aired just a few months before YouTube launched, and McPhee’s Idol performance aired about a year after that, so Tunstall was actually one of the early pop stars to go viral, at a time when “going viral” wasn’t even a thing. The irony is not lost on her, even after all these years.

“Really, if YouTube hadn’t existed, I probably wouldn’t be here, because I was always about the music and didn’t particularly want to be about the image. I just wanted to be a musician and a player,” she says. “And actually, in the end, it was people seeing what I did that was the thing that blew it up.”