Dancing to the Music in My Head by Sanjaya Malakar & Alan Goldsher

Author:Sanjaya Malakar & Alan Goldsher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Despite the bad reviews from the judges, I’d completed my mission. My plan was to sing as best I could, to listen to the judges’ criticism, to absorb what could be absorbed and apply it to my songs, and to come back and do it again next week. And after Rudy Cardenas, Amy Krebs, Nicole Tranquillo, and Paul Kim were eliminated, I knew my plan had succeeded.

At least for the time being.

Amy Krebs sang Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” and she had this beautiful dress on and her voice was so sweet—it totally made me love her. I told Amy, “That’s one of my favorite Bonnie songs, and you made it ten times better than Bonnie did.” I can’t imagine what she could’ve done beyond what she did during her performance. The Big Three, however, thought that her performance as a whole was dull, and after they cut her, I realized—or rerealized, actually—that being an American idol is about so much more than singing. It’s about being an entire single package, and how many viewers they think you’ll draw, and marketability, and connecting with everybody, and it’s possible that the only reason I was allowed to move forward, and Amy wasn’t, was that I looked the camera in the eye. Plus, it probably didn’t hurt that Simon said that thing about my hair.

At any rate, it still pisses me off that Amy got cut. She was awesome.

The day after Amy, Rudy, Nicole, and Paul were gone, one of the vocal coaches cornered me and said, “I wish I’d had a chance to work with you last week. I’d have told you that the only way to make that song work is to be lively and get hot. Listen to the way Stevie did it. He went for it. That’s what you have to do. Go for it. And also, you need to sing on top of the beat. You can’t lay back.” Being a mellow guy, I had a tendency to lay back behind the beat and drag it, and sometimes that works—the R & B singer D’Angelo is an expert at that—but sometimes it doesn’t, and I think what the coach was saying was that when you have a midtempo ballad like “Knocks Me Off My Feet,” you can’t drag, or else the song will be a drag.

That was great advice and I took it to heart, although it would’ve helped if I’d have known that earlier. I wish that’s the kind of thing that Simon, Randy, and Paula would tell us during judging, but I think that the non-musicians who watch Idol would get bored with that sort of technical music-speak.

Some contestants were a bit down after that first week, because even though they’d made it to the final twenty, Simon had trashed them on national television, and it’s hard enough being called out in the comfort of your own home, let alone on TV. But I was able to stay positive, and healthy both physically and mentally, thanks in part to Mom.

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