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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.

When American Idol Season 2 winner Ruben Studdard and runner-up Clay Aiken returned to the Fox network this spring to compete as the Beets on The Masked Singer, it was must-see reality TV. But nothing could compare to their first television run, 21 years ago, when American Idol was a game-changing pop-culture phenomenon.

The Ruben/Clay American Idol finale, when the two were separated by only 134,000 out of 24 million votes, still ranks as the series’ all-time highest-rated episode, with an astounding 38.1 viewers. Studdard and Aiken’s Idol season premiered just four months after Season 1, which had been a surprise summer smash, ended. So, they were the contestants who first experienced true Idol madness.

“Kelly [Clarkson] and Justin [Guarini] of course did it first,” Aiken tells Lyndsanity. “But I think I would argue that Ruben and I sort of did it first, because 30 percent — I checked this the other day… we got a 30 share that night on the finale. So, 30 percent of all TVs in America that were turned on were watching the finale. Which is unheard-of now! And so, we kind of got thrown out of this bubble… and into a fire.”

When Season 2 launched in January 2003, Studdard and Aiken had no idea what to expect, and they stayed in their “bubble” for months, unaware of the show’s growing momentum. “It was so unscripted. I mean, we were on a season where we didn’t have a real [band]; we sang to track. Our set was made, no joke, out of papier-mâché,” Aiken chuckles. “We were in the very rudimentary, early, primitive version of Idol, and so there weren’t any stakes. We went into this show not realizing that it was going to be this enormous behemoth that would change our lives forever. We all kind of thought it was going to be this fun experience. We’d get to be on TV, maybe we meet some people. None of us expected it to be such a big deal.”

Studdard was content to stay in the bubble, because that let him focus on competing. (“I did not want it to be a tie. I wanted to win!” he laughs.) The eventual champ had no idea just how massive his season had become until it was was almost over. “A lot of the things that that the general public is privy to, we didn’t get to see,” he explains. “We didn’t get see the People magazine articles and all this kind of stuff. We were literally there to do a specific job. And most of the time that we had that was downtime, we were either talking to one of our family members downstairs, trying to watch a movie together, playing on the PlayStation, or eating — which, even though we all gained weight, we didn’t have a lot of time to do that much either! I just think that they had us so laser-focused on the task at hand that it really wasn’t any time for us to hear the chatter.”

Studdard laughingly remembers his first experience with the “chatter,” when the show’s producers finally gave the contestants a shared computer — “a huge Apple, the iMac, the very first one” — and he, Clay, and their castmates curiously browsed an Idol message board during their limited downtime. “We finally found out what ‘message boards’ were. We were like, ‘Hey, people are actually talking about us!””

“Yeah, it’s crazy for people to think now, 20 years later, that there was no social media. It didn’t exist — Facebook, Twitter, none of that existed at all,” Aiken marvels. “There were these little message boards buried into the Fox website that people went on. There were cell phones, but there was not really texting. … It was so different back then.”

Aiken says it wasn’t until the week after the Season 2 American Idol finale, when he and Studdard went to see their castmate Frenchie Davis perform in a Broadway production of Rent, that it sank in that they’d become overnight superstars. “We showed up to the show. We sat down in our seats. They started the show. And then they stopped it to move Ruben and I up to the balcony, because nobody was watching the show! [Fans] were trying to take pictures with us, so they had to move us.”

Idol-mania continued in full force from that season on. Studdard’s debut album, Soulful, debuted at No. 1 (selling more than 400,000 copies it its first week), went platinum, and earned the “Velvet Teddy Bear” a Grammy nomination. Aiken became Idol’s first non-winner — paving the way for the likes of Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson, and Adam Lambert — going double-platinum with his own chart-topping debut and even landing on the cover of Rolling Stone. The “Claymate” craze continued three years later when, looking almost recognizable with his flat-ironed black hair, a glowed-up Aiken surprised superfan Michael Sandecki on the Season 5 finale — which, Aiken happily points out, was the second-highest-rated finale in Idol history.

However, Studdard speculates that Season 2 “felt more like family” than other seasons, possibly because of its historic timing. “It’s weird even now, when we’ve both gone back to the show several times, to see how the contestants interact with each other, which is completely different than how we were as a group,” he says. “We were literally a real family. … When one of our castmates left, we really cared. It wasn’t like, ‘Such-and-such is going home; we’ll never talk to them again.’ As soon as somebody went home, we were trying to figure out how we can get them to come back to the house and hang out! We really were a unit like that.”

And that familial friendship continues two decades later for Studdard and Aiken, whether they’re on the road together (they just finished their 20th anniversary joint tour), co-starring in holiday Broadway revues… or dressing up as purple root vegetables.

“We kind of got thrown into the fire — separately, but at the same time, together. A lot of what happened to us right after the show, for that first summer, we shared. And there’s a bond that comes out of that. We went through hell, in a way, and we survived,” Aiken says, adding with the chuckle: “And we went through hell on The Masked Singer wearing those costumes.”

Watch Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken’s full interview above, in which Studdard does a spontaneous William Hung impression and Aiken shares thoughts about late Idol contestant Mandisa.

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