courtesy of Reybee, Inc.

Ahead of the Human League’s first headlining U.S. tour in 15 years, I interviewed the self-described “haircut at the front” of the band, Philip Oakey, for FLOOD Magazine. It was an honor, and I kept feeling fascination through the entire conversation.

The sole original member in the current Human League lineup after multiple personnel changes, Oakey was quite self-deprecating throughout our interview. He insisted that he’s “about 150th the singer of [Soft Cell’s] Marc Almond or Alison Moyet” and was considered “tone-deaf” when the Human League started; he repeatedly credited Gary Numan, Ultravox, and the Flying Lizards with laying the groundwork for his success; and he even claimed that Human League’s revolutionary debut single “Being Boiled” — a song that David Bowie declared “the future of music” in 1978 — gave them an “authenticity that maybe we don’t deserve.”

Such modesty was entirely unexpected from this bold new-wave superstar, whose asymmetrical and angular Sassoon bob, kohl-ringed stare, and booming baritone once made such an indelible impression in the early MTV era that Michael Jackson hired Steve Barron to direct “Billie Jean” after seeing Barron’s cinematic video for “Don’t You Want Me.”

Oakey was also grateful for this upcoming 21-date tour, a full-circle development in that the Human League, along with Soft Cell, effectively kickstarted music’s “Second British Invasion” when their respective synthpop singles “Don’t You Want Me” and “Tainted Love” dominated U.S. radio during the summer of ’82.

“It’s terrifying, isn’t it? It doesn’t make any sense!” Oakey marveled when asked about headlining the Human League’s biggest-ever American tour, this many decades into their career. “But I can’t be too terrified of anything now, because I’m 70. Whatever happens, everything is just a bonus and a chance to enjoy experiences that I never thought I would have in my whole life.”

READ THE INTERVIEW HERE!

Deb Never is living the dream — even if it’s a dream that she never imagined when she was growing up all over the world, from America’s Pacific Northwest to East Asia, as Deborah Jung, the shy but rebellious youngest child of a pastor and a nurse. The indie-rock/alt-R&B singer-songwriter is at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records celebrating the release of her much-anticipated stellar debut album, Arcade, and like many things in her career, the day hasn’t gone as planned… but in the best possible way.

Deb had intended to perform at the store acoustically, but then someone unexpectedly handed her one of Prince’s guitars, so she of course had no choice but to go electric. Sitting with LPTV after her Prince-ly performance and fan autograph signing, Deb is still in awe, as she gazes down at the (no pun intended) symbolic instrument.

“All I know is, nobody has played this [guitar] except for Prince, Billy Corgan… and now me, which is crazy,” she marvels. “I felt a little the star power from it. But yeah, honestly, I was holding it and like, I felt not worthy of playing it.”

photo courtesy of Giant Music

Deb is in good company and is indeed worthy. And she doesn’t need any superstar’s borrowed guitar to radiate star power on her own — even if she once suffered from such extreme stage fright that at her first gig at a Spokane coffee shop, at age 19, she froze mid-song and “just literally walked off and then walked home.” (She only very recently returned to doing intimate stripped-back or acoustic shows, like the rare one she just played at Licorice Pizza.)

Incredibly, there was a time when Deb “didn’t really see a career in music.” In fact, she only moved to Los Angeles as “kind of an accident” and as a “very last minute, on-the-win decision” when, during a summer vacation before returning to college, she made some new friends who hooked her up with work as a session guitarist. (This eventually led to her collaborating with the likes of Brockhampton, Dominic Fike, Tommy Genesis, and Omar Apollo.) And even when she began to realize that a career in music actually “could be a thing” for her, she still expected to remain mostly behind the scenes, writing songs for other artists, before a music manager that knew her then-girlfriend discovered Deb’s home recordings via SoundCloud.

“I didn’t have it in my mind to put out music as an artist at first, and then I worked with him and he kind of uploaded a song for the first time on Spotify. And it just kind of snowballed from there,” Deb shrugs.

But there’s one endearing, amusing story that Deb shares, about her religious upbringing, that proves that even from an early age, despite any shyness or social anxiety, she knew who she was, she had a specific point of view, and she was always in control of her own destiny — and that the Arcade singer was always going to play the game of life her way.

“I remember when I was 13, I made a whole presentation [for my parents] for some reason. I was like, ‘I don’t want to go to church anymore, and here’s why,’” she laughs.

So, was this a PowerPoint? A diorama?

“Basically,” she chuckles. (Sadly, Deb doesn’t have this audiovisual display anymore, otherwise it could be an awesome stage prop during her more elaborate concerts.) “I got really into Greek mythology, and I would just be online just researching a bunch of other stories. Everyone has their own beliefs, but I came to my own conclusion of why I didn’t believe in the same thing as my parents, and I feel I had to present that to them, to have a valid argument and be like: ‘This is why.’”

Deb says her family — even her pastor father, with whom she had traveled throughout China, Malaysia, and South Korea when he was doing missionary work — were quite understanding and accepting. But perhaps they weren’t surprised, since Deb had already “gotten in trouble a lot in church as a kid” for always questioning what she was taught in youth group.

“I told my mom one day, ‘I don’t want to go to church anymore. I don’t believe in the same thing that you believe,’” she recalls. “And then there’s just a conversation, like: ‘Why?’ And I was like, ‘From what I’ve researched, there’s all these different stories or mythology or whatever that all feel similar, so I don’t believe in one thing. I feel like there is maybe something, but I don’t believe in the one specific thing that you do.’ And it was valid enough that they were like, ‘OK.’”

It was actually two years earlier, while an 11-year-old Deb was living with her father in Korea for a full year, that these rebellious seeds were planted — when, after watching videos online by “one of the biggest inspirations,” her Seattle hero Kurt Cobain — she taught herself how to play a guitar that she’d stolen from the local church. “It had a missing high E-string,” she laughs, only realizing literally in the middle of her LPTV interview that that five-string setup might have influenced her unique playing style, “because I do have a habit of playing a lot on the top four, and I think it maybe comes from that! … I initially wanted to play drums, but then I saw the guitar. It was kind of janky. There were multiple guitars, and I took the one that was broken because I was like, ‘No one’s going to miss this.’ And I took it home with me and taught myself how to play.”

That broken guitar was Deb’s salvation, so to speak, during a difficult year of isolation abroad. “I didn’t know how to speak the language; I am Korean, but I grew up mostly in Seattle and Spokane, so I didn’t know the language. I got thrown into a Korean school in not even a main city,” she explains. “So, [playing music] was kind of my way to feel some type of ‘home’ or comfort. I kind of used the guitar to be able to express, I guess, a lot of the feelings that I had, because I couldn’t speak and I didn’t know what was going on.”

Deb Never poses next to Prince’s guitar

Deb admits that she still deals with imposter syndrome, saying, “I just feel inadequate. … One of my biggest insecurities is playing guitar because I don’t think I’m a good guitar player, since I was a kid.” And she still describes her playing style as “self-taught,” after all this time, because, as she chucklingly explains, “I don’t know chords. I technically don’t know keys. I don’t know notes. I don’t know shit! I’m just playing by ear. So, when someone’s like, ‘Oh, can you play the C-sharp’ or whatever, I’m like, ‘I don’t know what that is. But play it for me, and I’ll figure it out.’”

When Deb decided to stay in L.A. to pursue studio work — it should be pointed out that if other artists were so willing to hire her for their sessions, then she’s absolutely not an “inadequate” guitarist — her parents harbored even more doubts than she once had about music becoming her full-time career. But just like that time at age 13, when she convinced them that organized religion wasn’t for her, they let her find her own way, and she feels “very, very lucky for that. … It was mostly my mom a lot of my life, but she was very understanding of me and what I wanted to do or what I believed in. She was just kind of like, ‘Whatever, OK. You’re going to do what you’re going to do.’ … My parents for some reason have been very lenient. I think in the beginning they didn’t understand — same as me. ‘What are you doing with music? How are you going to survive?’ But I was just like, ‘I’m going to figure it out.’”

That whole “figuring it out” attitude obviously figures heavily in Deb’s story. Looking back on working for two years — a much longer creative process than usual for her — on Arcade, and the whirlwind of four EP releases and nomad living that led up to the album, including spending five months in her “second home” of London during the COVID-19 pandemic, she muses: “I feel like it’s one of those things where you just have to jump into it. You know when you learn how to swim and your parents just push you, and you sink or swim and survive? That’s kind of how it felt when I got pushed into [music]. And then I just had to survive. I think I was on this snowball of constantly having to release music and not having really any time to think about what I wanted to make, so for the album I kind of disappeared for a couple years. I needed that time to catch up with myself, because it had been nonstop.”

Deb approached making Arcade with “intentionally less production,” going back in some full-circle ways to her stage fright-stricken coffee shop roots as she placed her vocals more front-and-center than ever. “It was really vulnerable and exposing for me. But I wanted that,” she asserts. “I wanted it to feel like you’re in the room with me when you listen to these songs.”

One Arcade track, “Deign,” was so vulnerable, however, that Deb actually considered taking it off the album. While she’s reluctant to get too in-depth regarding the song’s backstory, she notes, “I think you could probably pick up from lyrics what I’m talking about.” Some of the most telling lines include: “Remove the pressure from the room/One hit could knock the wind out/Too young to notice that my lips are turning blue/Laying with my face down/Think I finally found some peace that afternoon/Didn’t want it to end/If I ever come down, will I feel this good again?”

“It was purely just like, oof. You could hear everything that I’m saying about a certain thing, and I’m like, ‘Eh, I don’t know…’” Deb says, when asked why she considered leaving “Deign” off Arcade. “I think that was the most exposing for me, because I don’t think I’ve ever talked about my past, whether it was drugs or life experience. That was the first song where I didn’t talk about love or relationships. It was just a very specific moment of something that happened in my life.”

Deb also tapped into her long-held agnosticism on “Deign,” contemplating at one point, “If there’s a God, why does He only talk to me when I’m high?” But she says it’s Arcade’s slightly “Purple Rain”-esque heartbreak ballad “Heavensake” that has garnered the most fan feedback. “It’s a yearning song about somebody. And, oh — actually the chorus has to do with maybe the God thing!” she points out. “The chorus is literally: ‘Heaven’s so far away/I don’t believe in a god/But tonight I think I’ll pray.’”

Deb says she’s “more like spiritual” these days, but whether it was kismet, divine intervention, luck, talent, hard work, or a combination of any of the above, it seems Deb’s prayers (or dreams) have been answered when it comes to her blossoming career. Besides releasing a critically acclaimed album (which will later come out as a deluxe edition, featuring all-star collaborations to be announced), she has mostly conquered her shyness through music, she has her own Arcade-themed video game, and now she can even add “played Prince’s guitar” to her ever-lengthening list of accomplishments. So, now there’s only one (game-related) prayer that needs to be answered.

“My favorite video game right now is Fortnite,” Deb says. “I would always make a joke. It’s not a joke, though! I’m so serious about this: Once I get a Fortnite skin is when I’ll know I’ve made it, literally. That’s when I’ll stop.”

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: Betsy Annas

I am thrilled to announce that I have received seven nominations for the Los Angeles Press Club‘s 2026 Southern California Journalism Awards, including Entertainment Journalist of the Year! This nomination recognizes my work for Licorice Pizza Records, FLOOD, Gold Derby, Music Connection, and other outlets, as well as for Lyndsanity.

Three of my other nominations are for this very website, the completely independent Lyndsanity.com — including best Blog, Individual.

In the Audio Journalism category, my Lyndsanity interview with the Church’s Steve Kilbey is also up for best Personality Profile/interview, Entertainment Personalities (Over 10 Minutes) — we talked for well over 10 minutes, of course! — and in the Online category, my adorable and heart-warming interview with Vicki Peterson and John Cowsill is up for best Music Feature, Groups.

One of my favorite articles of my career, my Gorillaz cover story for FLOOD, is up for best Music Feature in the Magazines category, and I’ve also received two Online category nominations for my work with Gold Derby: best Music Feature, Solo Artists for my Sean Lennon interview, and best Entertainment Commentary, Arts for a piece breaking down my 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ballot, which was immense fun to write.

For the first time in a while, I am not competing against myself in any categories! But I am proud to be competing against so many colleagues I admire, and I would be happy to lose to any of them. As they say in the business, it’s an honor just to be nominated. And it really, truly is.

Congratulations to my worthy fellow nominees; I’m looking forward to celebrating with you all at the ceremony on June 28. Click here for the full list of categories, and scroll down for the list of my nominations.

ENTERTAINMENT JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR
Lyndsanity, Licorice Pizza Records, FLOOD, Gold Derby, Music Connection

ONLINE: BLOG, INDIVIDUAL
Lyndsanity

MAGAZINES: MUSIC FEATURE
FLOOD Magazine, “The House Gorillaz Built”

AUDIO JOURNALISM: PERSONALITY PROFILE/INTERVIEW, ENTERTAINMENT PERSONALITIES (OVER 10 MINUTES)
Lyndsanity, “The unguarded moments: The Church’s Steve Kilbey opens up about 45-year career, loveless fascinations with Duran Duran and record label ‘f***ing idiots and philistines,’ and more”

ONLINE: MUSIC FEATURE, SOLO ARTISTS
Gold Derby, “Sean Ono Lennon on his ‘Mind Games’ Grammy nomination and stewarding his family’s legacy: ‘I’m trying to do good by my own father’”

ONLINE: MUSIC FEATURE, GROUPS
Lyndsanity, “How powerpop power couple Vicki Peterson & John Cowsill’s real-life romance was predicted by teenage fan-fiction: ‘You’re either going to find this adorable, or you’re going to run screaming into the night’”

ONLINE: ENTERTAINMENT COMMENTARY, ARTS
Gold Derby, “Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2025: Our voter’s unfiltered official ballot”

The Eldest Daughter, the debut album by Florida-born indie-folk artist Gatlin that sees its deluxe reissue this week, might have been ever-so-slightly overshadowed by Taylor Swift’s The Life of Showgirl, which coincidentally featured a song called “Eldest Daughter” and was released on the same day last year. But rest assured, this fearless (no pun intended) singer-songwriter very much has her own unique voice.

Inspired by her conservative Christian upbringing in Florida (as, you guessed it, the oldest of three children), and how she has processed and made peace with her childhood trauma since coming out eight years ago (she even re-read her teenage diaries during the recording process), Gatlin Thornton’s album is heavy at times. “I think that Christianity and my relationship with God was so tied into my identity, and growing up, I was very much taught that I was born bad. I was born evil, and God is the only thing that is good. That’s a really damaging way to grow up,” she explains, sitting with Licorice Pizza Records’ LPTV in Studio City right before her in-store performance. “I had to learn how to trust myself and believe that I was good.”

But The Eldest Daughter is also laced with wry humor, whether it’s the clever play on words in “Florida Man” (the comma is silent); the diaristic, nostalgic memories of Gatlin’s first girl-crush in “If She Was a Boy”; the rebellious declaration in “Jesus Christ & Country Clubs” when she sings, “I’m going to hell because girls are fun”; or that moment in “Man of the House” when she proclaims, “My cats can be gay if they want to!”

And that humor definitely comes through in Gatlin’s charming and candid LPTV interview (as seen in the video above and Q&A below), in which she opens up about undergoing ketamine therapy; dissociating during interviews (thankfully she didn’t during this one!); the whole “Florida Man” viral phenomenon; going (temporarily) no-contact with her family; donning empowering male drag in her music video; her ever-shifting relationship with spirituality; and, yes, gay cats.

LPTV: I’d love to start by asking about the significance of the title The Eldest Daughter, because I know you grew up in a conservative, religious family.

GATLIN: I think I was in this process of really doing a lot of healing with my family dynamic, and really a lot of things were coming to light. And so, naturally, I’m going to write about it.. And everything I was writing about was pointing towards being an eldest daughter and all of the pressures that come along with that.

What was your family’s dynamic, in terms the pressures you felt as the oldest of three kids?

I felt like in a lot of ways the truth-teller, the protector, another parent.

Did you feel you had more expectations placed on you, because you were the leader of the pack? When you’re the eldest, you’re the kid that does everything first.

Or you’re the guinea pig!

Yes! And also, parents are usually much harder and stricter with the oldest child. By the time the later kids come around, they’re much more chill.

It is crazy, the difference. I think also because when [the oldest is] female and the baby [of the family] is male, the gender of it all… yeah, there was a big difference. I wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers, or what I was consuming in media was just very strict, versus with the baby it was free reign.

I do want to get into specific songs on the record that address your childhood, but in general, what were you revisiting or maybe even reinterpreting when you were making this album?

I think it really started with my queerness and figuring that out. And then it was not only an issue with my family, my queerness, but then to talk about it publicly. It was almost more of a big deal when I decided I wanted to start talking about it and letting other people know! Because I think that’s a Southern culture thing: having this presentation of being perfect and everything is all put together, and not wanting the judgment from other people. So, it felt like I had to just full send it and go all the way there, of being honest and being open publicly in my art and my songs.

When did you come out?

When I was 19. Now I’m 27.

(photo: Dualtone Music Group)

So, it was relatively later in life for you.

Yeah. And it was bisexual. I came out as, “Oh, I have a crush on this girl.” But even at the time, I was like, “But I’m not going to do anything about it,” because I was still in the church. And so, it was very interesting, the way that I even presented it to my family and my community. It was like, “Everyone start praying for me! I have feelings for a girl!” It took me a really long time to process it and be OK with it myself. And then I was still dating men, so I think maybe my family would view it as I only came out two years ago, because that was when I was really [started] dating women.

Did they think it was a phase?

Yes. And obviously it wasn’t a phase!

Where do they stand with all this now?

It’s a process. I think they’ve come a long way from when it started. The song on my album “Love Me” is a song to my mom, kind of about right when I came out and she was saying extremely hurtful things. It has come a long way since then, but I still am struggling with it, because I do think that there is a difference between tolerating something and celebrating something about someone. I want this part of me to be celebrated.

How did your mother react to “Love Me”? I assume she’s heard it and knows it’s about her?

Yeah, I did show [my family] all of the music before it came out. It’s a hard thing that we’ve been having to navigate, because for me, this is my story and I’m just trying to be honest and it’s my way to process. I was like, “I’m not trying to hurt you through this!” But I think she did take it as hard to hear.

You mentioned this crush that you had on a girl, which was sort of your sexual awakening. The song “If She Was a Boy” is about that. Tell me about that real-life experience.

I wrote that [two years] ago, but from the perspective of 19-year-old me, when I was in that place of “I have feelings for a girl, everyone start praying.”

Did you really want to “pray the gay way”?

Oh, man. Yeah. I truly believed that if I acted on that [crush], I would go to hell. And so, it was a product of the environment I grew up in, and was in. I was living in Nashville [at that point]. I was at a Christian school and surrounded by other Christian kids and deep in the church. I grew up Baptist, and then we went to an evangelical Presbyterian church. It was very much: “Go spread the word of God, go convert everyone.” It was fear-based. I didn’t want anyone to go to hell.

This seems like it was traumatic, and yet you seem very untraumatized. You’re sort of laughing and joking as you talk about it.

I think maybe that’s just my way of coping with it. I’ve done a lot of work about all of this. I’m currently doing ketamine therapy. It’s really rocking my world.

I don’t know if you ever acted upon that crush at age 19, or if that woman knows about it. But I do believe I’ve read that you wrote about her in your diaries, and it was finding and re-reading those diaries — and in the process rediscovering your 19-year-old self — that spurred much of this album.

Yeah, because that was kind of the first moment when I began to really question. Maybe it was because I wasn’t living in Florida anymore; I was in Nashville. I felt in the space to start questioning. Before I was like, “Well, I’m as religious as it comes,” but I finally had the space to start questioning these feelings, and then that just stirred up kind of an entire deconstruction of faith, of politics, of what my family dynamic was, of gender. That was the catalyst.

Is it weird when you visit home? Is it one of those cliché situations of awkwardly being at the dinner table with people who don’t share the same beliefs you have now?

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people are having a hard time because of the political climate right now. [I didn’t go] home for the holidays [last] year. It’s my first time not going home for the holidays, but the beautiful thing about it is I have this chosen family and a beautiful community of friends and the queer community. I had a wonderful Friendsgiving and there was just so much love and acceptance.

I do think the whole notion of chosen family is very important. I assume you’re not religious anymore, at least not the religion you were raised in, but are you still spiritual, or do you still have some kind of faith in your own way? How do you define your faith, or are you just completely agnostic or atheist now?

Thank you for asking that! I love talking about it! I’m definitely very spiritual. I’m kind of like, re-finding God. For a while I had to separate from it, because there was a lot of pain attached to God. But it wasn’t God — it was people and humans that would corrupt it. I’m kind of in my journey of finding out what [faith] looks like. I’ve been in a lot of discovery, looking into different religions, reading the Bible again and seeing what I feel about this, now that things have kind of calmed. I think I’m just searching right now.

Is ketamine helping with that? I don’t know much about ketamine therapy.

I’ve been seeing this therapist for like eight months. I went to this place, got prescribed the medicine. We refer to it as “medicine.” It’s been very helpful for me. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but she had suggested it. I think it’s just been a way for me to reprocess things or create new neural pathways, because I can logically know something so well, but my body would still react. Even this process of doing interviews for the record and talking about the way that I grew up and family things… I was doing a podcast [recently] and I fully dissociated mid-podcast. And so, it’s just like, “Oh, there’s still work to do.”

I hope you don’t dissociate during this interview! Actually, you’re welcome to dissociate if that’s what you want to do, but hopefully you’re OK with how this interview is going so far. Do you mind me asking what the podcast question was that triggered that response?

I think it was just something about my parents and what they thought about me. And I just was like, “Annnnnd… I’m now no longer in my body.” It’s a body-keeps-score thing. The body remembers.

Well, if anything I ask bothers you to the point that it would make you disassociate, please let me know.

It would have a few months ago, but I have done a lot of work and I’m much better.

I’m glad to hear that, because as I get into asking about specific track, we’re obviously going to get deeper into this. I did want to ask about “Jesus Christ & Country Clubs,” because I love the line :“I’m going to hell because girls are fun.” That’s a great line.

I think that song is more me being a little bit angry. Growing up, I wasn’t really allowed to feel anger, or I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be angry. It felt good to get some of that out. It’s about hypocritical Christianity, like MAGA Christianity, and how the Jesus I knew wouldn’t be acting like this. It was really therapeutic for me to write that and to feel angry about it.

Which song on the record is the most therapeutic for you to perform live?

That one’s really fun. I feel like at shows, that’s the one that people really respond to and get excited about. “Love Me” is one that I have not been able to sing live without crying. I’m very deeply uncomfortable, but I think that is a good thing. It also has allowed for people who are there at the show to make me feel safe and make me feel seen. And I think it makes the space feel very safe.

Another track, “The Hill,” is about religion as well. There’s a line in it about how walking away from Christianity was the greatest loss of your life and the hardest thing you ever had to do. I imagine that’s another cathartic and/or difficult song to perform live.

Yeah. I think that Christianity and my relationship with God was so tied into my identity, and growing up, I was very much taught that I was born bad. I was born evil, and God is the only thing that is good. That’s a really damaging way to grow up. And so, leaving that, I had to relearn… not relearn, but I had to learn how to trust myself and believe that I was good. All of these things that were very difficult to do. It felt like I was completely losing myself. And I think for a lot of people who grew up in Christianity, that’s why it’s so hard to question it or to walk away from it, because you have grown up thinking that’s how life is. And then, also, my whole family is in it. And church is also such a wonderful place for community; I had so many friends and I felt so loved. So, it was a really hard thing to walk away from. And yeah, that was a painful song to write, but I think a good one. It phrases it almost in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way.

https://youtu.be/O_Mpp3qR6hw?si=yqep6nBamGo2ST8M

When you talk about the community, did you lose a lot of friends or family members when you came out and changed the way you were living? Did you lose a lot of support? Did you have to make new friends?

It was a process, like a year’s process. I was living in Nashville at the time and a lot of my friends were all kind of coming out of it at the same time, which was really nice and felt less isolating. Family relationships changed, definitely. And that’s sad and heartbreaking, but also OK.

You do approach all this with a bit of humor, like I said before. You have a song called “Florida Man,” which I love because if you ever read The Onion or even the real news, there’s always a headline along the lines of, “Florida Man Does Some Crazy Shit.”

Have you done the thing where you put your birthday and then “Florida Man”? Google your birthday and “Florida Man,” and there’s always going to be something!

Ha! So yes, Florida has a bit of a reputation that’s probably somewhat deserved. But there’s a comma, at least an implied comma, in your song title, because you basically say, “I’m never going back to Florida, man!” It’s a fun play on words. So, tell me about this song, because there’s a lot of humor, but also a lot of anger in this too. It’s kind of like an F-U Florida, or at least that’s how I’m interpreting it.

I think now, retrospectively, I view “Florida Man” as this metaphor of almost who I was when I was living there, playing my role in my family dynamic and not being who I was and not questioning and being in the closet and all of these things, I kind of view it as, “OK, I’m never going back to that.” Through honestly writing this album, I kind of got to reclaim Florida as mine.

I hope anyone reading or watching this interview who’s unfamiliar with your music doesn’t think The Eldest Daughter is an entirely a sad, mopey, angry record! So, I’ll cite another example of your lyrical humor, in “Man of the House.” My favorite line in the album is from that song: “My cats can be gay if they want to.” I’m all for gay cats. I’m all for cats living their truth.

Let the cats be gay!

Yes! But what is “Man of the House” really about? Because that’s a loaded term — patriarchy, gender roles, all that.

Yeah, I was kind of claiming that for myself. In the visualizer I did, I was in male drag. I had a beard and the camo and I felt awesome; I feel like it unlocked something in me. When I wrote it, I was living in an apartment by my own, by myself, and paying the bills from my music, which was wild. And at the time I wasn’t talking to my parents, because you go through breaks, or at least I do with them.

Are you talking to them now?

No, not right now.

Oh, I’m sorry.

It’s OK. So yeah, I think it was the first time that I was like, “OK, I’m a little bit on my own. Let me figure this out.” I just felt powerful. It was a time of my life when I was like, “I’m a strong person!” So, I wrote “Man of the House” and I was like, “I get to live by my rules. My cats, if they want to be gay, can be gay!”

Are your cats gay?

One of them definitely is gay. For sure, gay. My partner says that I project a little bit. Like, I’m almost forcing them to be gay, when they might not be.

You’ve just got to let your kids, even your furry kids, be who they want to be, whether they’re gay or not. That’s one thing we’ve learned one thing from this interview! I also want to ask about “Soho House Valet,” because your press release called it the “north star” of The Eldest Daughter. It’s about a very specific conversation you had with a family member, I assume at Soho House…

I wrote that a week after I had this f fight with my dad walking into Soho House Warehouse in Downtown L.A., and I wrote it to process that. I was very honest in a way that I hadn’t in my writing before. I viewed the song as, “Well, this is for me. No one else is going to hear it. So, who cares? I’ll just say everything.” And then I sat with it for a while and I was like, “You know what? I think I do want to put this out. And I want to make an entire album that is this honest and is for myself.” I guess why it’s the north star. It was like the catalyst of, “OK, I want to start making music in this way.”

Do you mind me asking why you’re not speaking with your parents right now?

I think it’s a rollercoaster. Relationships change. And right now for me, as this album’s coming out and I’m talking about it, and there’s been fights, and the political climate… it’s just a lot. And I’m kind of like, one thing at a time. Sometimes space is good for healing as well. When things are really emotionally charged, sometimes it’s OK to say, “Everyone needs to take a break. Take a break and breathe for a second.”

But even though you have differences of opinion, different political beliefs, different religious beliefs, I understand that your parents always been very supportive of you of being an artist from very young age. And that’s interesting. Maybe some people would assume they’d be like, “Be a housewife! Don’t pursue a career!”  But they always encouraged you to be musician.

Yes, and I feel like that’s such a gift, because I’ve had so many friends who parents were like, “OK, be practical.” And doing music is not practical. It’s a hard thing to go out and pursue. And especially my parents are not creatives and not in this world, so they didn’t really understand it, but they were willing to learn with me and figure it out. So, I’m like, “OK, see? If you can do that with music, then you can do that with me being gay, too!”

Did you always want to play music?

Yeah, when I was young, it was always, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I’d say: “A singer! I want to be a singer. I want to write my songs.” Maybe in middle school I thought I would do something practical, but then in high school I got diagnosed with an anxiety and depressive disorder and I was like, “Music is the only thing that makes me happy.” And I was really supported in that.

So, your parents supported you in your mental health journey and got you help, et cetera?

Yes, they did. So, you see, they’re not… there’s so many redeeming qualities. I had a lot of great things in my childhood.

I’m glad to hear that. So, let’s end things on that positive note. You were obviously unpacking a lot of stuff from your adolescence when making this record that was painful or dark, but there’s nostalgia on The Eldest Daughter too. What did you revisit that was nice to remember?

I think the last track, “Kissimmee,” which is where I was born. I had gone back to Florida and was able to go out with some queer people and discover so many beautiful people in Florida and be with family in a really positive way. And I was like, “Oh, I have this nostalgia for childhood again!” Coming back and being able to be who I am and really love who I am in Florida, I think was really good for me — because I’d kind of had this view of loving a place so much, but not really being loved by it. Maybe that’s a generalization, but you can find pockets and find people anywhere.

My last question is, what advice do you have for people who are going through something similar — whether it’s coming out, or just in some way breaking away from their upbringing — about they can be as grounded as you seem to be now?

Oh, wow, thank you! … I think being honest with yourself and learning how to love yourself is such an important thing. And I think I was able to do that by spending a lot of time by myself and doing a lot of work, but also finding community and finding people who celebrate you for exactly who you are. And it doesn’t need to be a lot. I think that has made all the difference with me — just having my few friends who are like, “I see you. I love you. And I’m here for you no matter what.”

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.”

As tours by high-profile pop artists like Post Malone, Meghan Trainor, and the Pussycat Dolls get scaled back or canceled altogether, some industry insiders are blaming “blue dot fever,” the trend of unsold seats showing up on ticket platforms (thus signaling weaker demand).

While some performers cite production logistics or personal/health issues for their canceled concerts, others, like the Pussycat Dolls, have admitted or at least implied that low ticket sales are indeed to blame.

I joined FOX 5 New York this week to discuss how rising touring costs, over-ambitious arena bookings, and the simple fact that fewer fans are willing or able to shell out big bucks in this economy as reasons for this ticket-sales decline… and what all this might mean for the music industry in general.