Heartbreak sex and not belonging....well....I suppose AI is a little like life after all.
“Baby don’t you cry,
Gonna make a pie
Gonna make a pie with the heart in the middle
Baby don’t be blue
Gonna make for you
Gonna make a pie with the heart in the middle”
Everyone should hunt out and watch Waitress. It is a beautiful film and a wonderful tribute to its writer/director/actress Adrienne Shelly.
Well this will hopefully not be as long as the last part as there aren’t as many people to talk about but oh how this week really REALLY picked up in these final three contestants.
Allison:
So I have literally just this second hunted out the Bonnie Raitt version of this song to compare them. I had never heard it before, although I was actually of listening age when the song came out which makes a change for this show, but it wasn’t one that had crossed my radar. But I found it, I’ve listened to it, I’ve noticed the differences to Allison’s version.
I think Allison’s version is a little bit better. Now you’re really not going to hear me say that often, and not just about Allison, about them all. But I think the slightly speeded up tempo did the song a world of good. Plus the husk in Allison’s voice was really suited to this song. Sometimes I feel when watching Allison that she’s trying to impersonate a rock singer. She has the voice to suit the style but it always feels as if she’s trying too hard to be seen as the rock chick. This week she toned all that down and she let us simply listen to her voice. And what a voice she has. She has control over that voice, in that style of singing, that is, as everyone keeps pointing out, simply incredible for someone of her age. But ignoring her age it’s pretty incredible for someone of any age. I still feel she’s trying too hard to make us see her in a certain way, as opposed to trusting us to do that naturally. But as comfortable as she is on stage, she will become more natural up there given time, and Allison has time. Maybe not on this competition because for some reason people are not voting, but after this show she’ll definitely get more practice.
I can’t believe that someone, somewhere will not sign her whether she wins or not. And that’s a good thing because a voice like that deserves to be heard. Get her some good song writers, those who are working for Kelly Clarkson would be a great start, or those who are helping Pink, or someone completely knew and let them create a style together, and set her loose. Pink and Clarkson have amazing voices but these are made all the better by the good songs to use them on, just compare the decent stuff to the bad songs on the albums and the difference is undeniable, the voice itself is not enough to make a memorable song. ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’, however, will still be being pulled out for parties in 30 years time….I’m not so sure about Pink’s music but there’s a chance. But Allison could easily be as good as them. OK, I don’t really approve of someone as young as her being shoved into the spotlight that forcefully, we’ve all seen how well child stars turn out. Not all no, there are a few, Keri Russell and Ryan Gosling pop to mind, but a lot of them do end up pretty fucked up.
One of the reasons I’ll very rarely say that I think a cover version is better than the original is because the writer of the song is often connected emotionally to the music in a way that the people who cover them aren’t. Which of course doesn’t apply to all the songs not written by the singers. And if you’ve read my previous analysis of Allison’s performances you’ll know that not connecting to the song is my main complaint about her. Well this week I think she did a very good impression of emotionally connecting with the music. She didn’t fully manage it, I didn’t feel she was living the song, but it was a very very good presentation of it.
But all this is by the way side when it comes to Allison. Because of that voice. Hell, that voice is so good that Simon has stopped mentioning it and now only complains about everything else. He is right in a way, if she is going to succeed she needs to become more memorable as herself, but I think she needs to be find who that is first. Being pigeonholed into choosing a personality now would be a big mistake. But she does need to let the audience in more. I think if she does that then she’ll stand less of a chance of ending up in the bottom three for the next few weeks. The people who are voting are not just voting for who they want to see sing, they’re voting for who they want to let into their houses week after week for the next…what…5 or 6 weeks.
I get into an argument in class regularly about whether you have to like characters on TV more than those in film. I think that television characters have to gain your trust in a way that film characters do not because you go out to a film, you watch it in a dark room and then you leave it alone. Or you buy the DVD, watch it, put it back in its box, put it back on the shelf, and then wait a while before you get it down again. You can watch a film filled with people you hate because you can gain entertainment from them and then put them away. A television character get let into your bedroom, living room, kitchen on a regular basis, once a week, 3 times a week, 5 times a week. You have to like them, even like to hate them, to let them do that. And in reality television that is even more the case, because these aren’t characters. And at this point in the game they’re not even the specifically chosen version of themselves that they will eventually end up showing to the world. So we have to like these people, we have to want to spend time with them. And with Allison it’s not that we don’t like her, it’s that we don’t know her. She’s not coming across as someone innately memorable, and she needs to. If she’d been discovered another way she would have either had training to make her publicly polished, or she would have played so many gigs in so many bars that it was ingrained, or she’d have just naturally created enough personality that her myspace page had taken off. But as it is she doesn’t have any of that and while she seems like someone who is probably a lot of fun and actually slightly crazy, because I don’t for one minute believe that Megan had the patent on that, I think Allison is right up there with her, and probably Adam is as well. But she needs to find a way to show us that. No she doesn’t have a lot of time to talk, and no we don’t need her to become so personality filled that she becomes Tatiana but she needs to start putting just a little more of her personality into her performances.
But this is all just icing on the cake, it is the voice that is the cake, the icing can be added at a later stage. Because with Allison it is all about the voice. After last week’s dismal ‘Don’t Speak’ this was what she needed. A part of me wishes she had chosen something younger and more fun but that’s being just me being pernickety.
Matt:
I think it comes as no surprise to know that I am ambivalent about Matt. I have this problem of knowing that the boy is super talented and yet not actually enjoying his music. After last week’s performance he needed something that picked him up and that got him back on his feet. And with this song he did that. Once again, like his performance of ‘Let’s Get It On’ it felt like he was trying to tell us he’s good in bed, but hell, he’s 23 years old, of course he’s trying to tell us that. But it was a good vocal, not one I personally like to listen to but it was exactly what he was trying to achieve.
I did like his little dance moves, he’s shimmying across the stage. Once again I it felt was a little Timberlake-ish. I don’t know if this is a deliberate decision on his behalf or if it is purely accidental. But one thing’s was for sure and that was for once Matt was being Matt. It was a little bit RnB, a little bit modern, a little bit blues. Matt has spent weeks ping-ponging between the different genres, seemingly getting more and more confused about where he fits but this performance felt as if for once he’d managed to combine all of them together to make a whole.
Matt is a phenomenal piano player, but, in my opinion, he is only a mediocre singer and so I was worried when he wasn’t behind his piano, but he performed the crap out of this song. I really didn’t expect to find it anywhere near as entertaining as it was. Matt is getting more and more comfortable up on that stage and it is showing. This was a real advance on the previous weeks. No, Matt is not the natural showman that some of them are, he seems to want to go for these big songs without having the stage presence to pull them off but whether he was genuinely more confident up there or simply faking it doesn’t matter, what matters is that he looked like he belonged up there and was enjoying himself. The little movements he started to get going felt at times a little bit as if they were being aborted part way through so it would be nice for him to get enough confidence to go through with the moves he decides to do. Moving about on stage is a good thing, no it’s not always called for and sometimes would be silly, but with this song it was great to see it start and would be better to see it taken to the next level.
Adam:
I promise to try and keep this short I know I have a tendency to wax poetic about Lambert but he just brings it out in me.
Firstly, and let me get my soap box out of the way right here at the beginning, I think Adam’s videos and the footage of his family are doing more for making homosexuality visible and as non-threatening as possible than anything that has yet been on television. His parents talking about their son who loved everything but sport, the total and utter acceptance they appear to have shown, even going so far as to buy him a mini three piece suit has probably done more for making those ill at ease with homosexuality more comfortable than anything before. This is not the fey best friend on a sitcom, this is not the overly sexual being in the drama series, this is someone’s son who led and still leads a pretty normal life…well…until this competition started. This is the guy you could meet in the bar. Yes we’ve all seen the pictures floating about on the net, and now on Bill O’Reilly (and wasn’t that section a hoot) but these videos probably do more to calm that all down than all the amazing performances in the world could.
These videos also have the advantage of making Adam look really very sweet and not at all as full of himself as his performances might indicate. Sure the man is confident but he’s not coming across as egotistical. Which is very important. The amount of press he is getting far out numbers the amount the others are getting combined and this could really end up going against him. There is the chance that Adam has peeked to soon and by the time the final comes around, or even the top 5,4 or 3, that people will have gotten bored of him. I hope this isn’t the case but these backlashes can start so quickly, just look at the Twilight one, and become so fierce that anything caught in their path is crushed. So hopefully these videos are helping diminish that even if just a little.
But the performance…well wasn’t that something. TWoP described it as ethereal and I think that was the perfect world to use. I liked the blue lighting, it meant that even though most of it was sung sitting on a stool we still got a show. With Adam it is never just about the singing, even when it is. ‘Tracks of my Tears’ and this were, ostensibly, purely about the vocals, but at the same time they just weren’t. ‘Tracks…’ was just as much about the look, about Adam showing us that he could be all about the singing, as it was about the singing. This was as much about the performance as a whole as it was the singing. In its own way this was as much a piece of performance art as ‘Ring…’. The blue lighting, barely showing the singer, was like something you would see in a theatre production. The white trousers and shoes picked up the blue of the lighting and reflected it even more. The entire outfit was chosen to go with that lighting scheme, black/grey/greeny and white, nothing that would clash with the lights, only colours that would take on a new sheen because of it. For as simple as it looked this was as thought out and rehearsed as everything Adam’s done. In fact, the one performance that has come across as the most low key was last week’s, something that would make sense if it was a last minute change.
But the singing on this was perfect. Yes, there was that final note which was out of tune, he overshot for the note and it came out a little sharp but very quickly pulled it back down. I found it very interesting that in the rehearsal footage in the package at the end the note was perfect from the get go. I did however like the fact that he messed up. It proved that he isn’t perfect, that he can make mistakes like the rest of the contestants. Professional singers sometimes make mistakes in their songs, and it doesn’t matter if everything else is there. Yes, it can only be the occasional note or something small like that (or in the case of Barenaked Ladies when I saw them a few years ago it could be forgetting the lyrics to the song you’ve been singing for 17 years :-D) but if the performance is there nothing is lost. Not a single thing got was taken away from this performance because of that bum note. Some people are saying this season’s a foregone conclusion, (because that didn’t happen last year with Archuleta!!!), something I don’t for one second believe, but this mistake made him just that little bit more fallible and will hopefully have squashed that all a little bit.
For the first time tonight, and for the first time in any of Adam’s performances, it genuinely felt like Adam was living that song, had lived that song. Adam is a wonderful performer and does, as Allison did tonight, tend to perform the emotion of the song rather than genuinely feel it. And while this may be eminently more emotionally sensible and healthy it does leave a little something to be desired. Singing one song on a show is not the same as an entire concert night after night and I think that for the one song it would be nice to see a genuine emotional connection. But this week it really felt like that was his heart out there on his sleeve and on that stage, and THAT’S why Simon gave the standing ovation. Whether it was always going to happen or whether it had to do with the immense pressure Adam must have been feeling knowing he was singing after the time the show was meant to have already finished I do not know, but what we saw this week was a heart felt, emotional performance, that brought the truth of the song out.
This was a brilliant choice of song. The original is wonderful, the Gary Jules version is fabulous in its own right and this version was right up there with them. What they all have in common is they represent a feeling most of us have felt. The idea that we don’t fit in, that we don’t belong, is one of the most common feelings in the world. It’s right up there with falling in love. This is something absolutely everyone has experienced and probably continues to experience. And therefore we connect to the song, and so did Adam.
One note though. Once again this song was pretty heavily up there in Adam’s falsetto range. And this is a very pretty range. I would, however, like to hear a bit more of his lower vocals. There was a hint of them in this performance, and it appears to be a rich and vibrant sound, but I think to change it up next week it would be nice to hear that aspect of his voice. It would, after all, bring something completely different to the table once again.
OK, so I’m done for this week, although, as always, I might be back at some point before next week’s show. I can’t help but think on the possible choices for next week but before coming out and stating the obvious I’d like to think on it a little more. But I will say that if anyone ever is going to try Bjork’s ‘Play Dead’ from The Young American’s than this is the week, and year, to attempt it :-D.
Gonna make a pie
Gonna make a pie with the heart in the middle
Baby don’t be blue
Gonna make for you
Gonna make a pie with the heart in the middle”
Everyone should hunt out and watch Waitress. It is a beautiful film and a wonderful tribute to its writer/director/actress Adrienne Shelly.
Well this will hopefully not be as long as the last part as there aren’t as many people to talk about but oh how this week really REALLY picked up in these final three contestants.
Allison:
So I have literally just this second hunted out the Bonnie Raitt version of this song to compare them. I had never heard it before, although I was actually of listening age when the song came out which makes a change for this show, but it wasn’t one that had crossed my radar. But I found it, I’ve listened to it, I’ve noticed the differences to Allison’s version.
I think Allison’s version is a little bit better. Now you’re really not going to hear me say that often, and not just about Allison, about them all. But I think the slightly speeded up tempo did the song a world of good. Plus the husk in Allison’s voice was really suited to this song. Sometimes I feel when watching Allison that she’s trying to impersonate a rock singer. She has the voice to suit the style but it always feels as if she’s trying too hard to be seen as the rock chick. This week she toned all that down and she let us simply listen to her voice. And what a voice she has. She has control over that voice, in that style of singing, that is, as everyone keeps pointing out, simply incredible for someone of her age. But ignoring her age it’s pretty incredible for someone of any age. I still feel she’s trying too hard to make us see her in a certain way, as opposed to trusting us to do that naturally. But as comfortable as she is on stage, she will become more natural up there given time, and Allison has time. Maybe not on this competition because for some reason people are not voting, but after this show she’ll definitely get more practice.
I can’t believe that someone, somewhere will not sign her whether she wins or not. And that’s a good thing because a voice like that deserves to be heard. Get her some good song writers, those who are working for Kelly Clarkson would be a great start, or those who are helping Pink, or someone completely knew and let them create a style together, and set her loose. Pink and Clarkson have amazing voices but these are made all the better by the good songs to use them on, just compare the decent stuff to the bad songs on the albums and the difference is undeniable, the voice itself is not enough to make a memorable song. ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’, however, will still be being pulled out for parties in 30 years time….I’m not so sure about Pink’s music but there’s a chance. But Allison could easily be as good as them. OK, I don’t really approve of someone as young as her being shoved into the spotlight that forcefully, we’ve all seen how well child stars turn out. Not all no, there are a few, Keri Russell and Ryan Gosling pop to mind, but a lot of them do end up pretty fucked up.
One of the reasons I’ll very rarely say that I think a cover version is better than the original is because the writer of the song is often connected emotionally to the music in a way that the people who cover them aren’t. Which of course doesn’t apply to all the songs not written by the singers. And if you’ve read my previous analysis of Allison’s performances you’ll know that not connecting to the song is my main complaint about her. Well this week I think she did a very good impression of emotionally connecting with the music. She didn’t fully manage it, I didn’t feel she was living the song, but it was a very very good presentation of it.
But all this is by the way side when it comes to Allison. Because of that voice. Hell, that voice is so good that Simon has stopped mentioning it and now only complains about everything else. He is right in a way, if she is going to succeed she needs to become more memorable as herself, but I think she needs to be find who that is first. Being pigeonholed into choosing a personality now would be a big mistake. But she does need to let the audience in more. I think if she does that then she’ll stand less of a chance of ending up in the bottom three for the next few weeks. The people who are voting are not just voting for who they want to see sing, they’re voting for who they want to let into their houses week after week for the next…what…5 or 6 weeks.
I get into an argument in class regularly about whether you have to like characters on TV more than those in film. I think that television characters have to gain your trust in a way that film characters do not because you go out to a film, you watch it in a dark room and then you leave it alone. Or you buy the DVD, watch it, put it back in its box, put it back on the shelf, and then wait a while before you get it down again. You can watch a film filled with people you hate because you can gain entertainment from them and then put them away. A television character get let into your bedroom, living room, kitchen on a regular basis, once a week, 3 times a week, 5 times a week. You have to like them, even like to hate them, to let them do that. And in reality television that is even more the case, because these aren’t characters. And at this point in the game they’re not even the specifically chosen version of themselves that they will eventually end up showing to the world. So we have to like these people, we have to want to spend time with them. And with Allison it’s not that we don’t like her, it’s that we don’t know her. She’s not coming across as someone innately memorable, and she needs to. If she’d been discovered another way she would have either had training to make her publicly polished, or she would have played so many gigs in so many bars that it was ingrained, or she’d have just naturally created enough personality that her myspace page had taken off. But as it is she doesn’t have any of that and while she seems like someone who is probably a lot of fun and actually slightly crazy, because I don’t for one minute believe that Megan had the patent on that, I think Allison is right up there with her, and probably Adam is as well. But she needs to find a way to show us that. No she doesn’t have a lot of time to talk, and no we don’t need her to become so personality filled that she becomes Tatiana but she needs to start putting just a little more of her personality into her performances.
But this is all just icing on the cake, it is the voice that is the cake, the icing can be added at a later stage. Because with Allison it is all about the voice. After last week’s dismal ‘Don’t Speak’ this was what she needed. A part of me wishes she had chosen something younger and more fun but that’s being just me being pernickety.
Matt:
I think it comes as no surprise to know that I am ambivalent about Matt. I have this problem of knowing that the boy is super talented and yet not actually enjoying his music. After last week’s performance he needed something that picked him up and that got him back on his feet. And with this song he did that. Once again, like his performance of ‘Let’s Get It On’ it felt like he was trying to tell us he’s good in bed, but hell, he’s 23 years old, of course he’s trying to tell us that. But it was a good vocal, not one I personally like to listen to but it was exactly what he was trying to achieve.
I did like his little dance moves, he’s shimmying across the stage. Once again I it felt was a little Timberlake-ish. I don’t know if this is a deliberate decision on his behalf or if it is purely accidental. But one thing’s was for sure and that was for once Matt was being Matt. It was a little bit RnB, a little bit modern, a little bit blues. Matt has spent weeks ping-ponging between the different genres, seemingly getting more and more confused about where he fits but this performance felt as if for once he’d managed to combine all of them together to make a whole.
Matt is a phenomenal piano player, but, in my opinion, he is only a mediocre singer and so I was worried when he wasn’t behind his piano, but he performed the crap out of this song. I really didn’t expect to find it anywhere near as entertaining as it was. Matt is getting more and more comfortable up on that stage and it is showing. This was a real advance on the previous weeks. No, Matt is not the natural showman that some of them are, he seems to want to go for these big songs without having the stage presence to pull them off but whether he was genuinely more confident up there or simply faking it doesn’t matter, what matters is that he looked like he belonged up there and was enjoying himself. The little movements he started to get going felt at times a little bit as if they were being aborted part way through so it would be nice for him to get enough confidence to go through with the moves he decides to do. Moving about on stage is a good thing, no it’s not always called for and sometimes would be silly, but with this song it was great to see it start and would be better to see it taken to the next level.
Adam:
I promise to try and keep this short I know I have a tendency to wax poetic about Lambert but he just brings it out in me.
Firstly, and let me get my soap box out of the way right here at the beginning, I think Adam’s videos and the footage of his family are doing more for making homosexuality visible and as non-threatening as possible than anything that has yet been on television. His parents talking about their son who loved everything but sport, the total and utter acceptance they appear to have shown, even going so far as to buy him a mini three piece suit has probably done more for making those ill at ease with homosexuality more comfortable than anything before. This is not the fey best friend on a sitcom, this is not the overly sexual being in the drama series, this is someone’s son who led and still leads a pretty normal life…well…until this competition started. This is the guy you could meet in the bar. Yes we’ve all seen the pictures floating about on the net, and now on Bill O’Reilly (and wasn’t that section a hoot) but these videos probably do more to calm that all down than all the amazing performances in the world could.
These videos also have the advantage of making Adam look really very sweet and not at all as full of himself as his performances might indicate. Sure the man is confident but he’s not coming across as egotistical. Which is very important. The amount of press he is getting far out numbers the amount the others are getting combined and this could really end up going against him. There is the chance that Adam has peeked to soon and by the time the final comes around, or even the top 5,4 or 3, that people will have gotten bored of him. I hope this isn’t the case but these backlashes can start so quickly, just look at the Twilight one, and become so fierce that anything caught in their path is crushed. So hopefully these videos are helping diminish that even if just a little.
But the performance…well wasn’t that something. TWoP described it as ethereal and I think that was the perfect world to use. I liked the blue lighting, it meant that even though most of it was sung sitting on a stool we still got a show. With Adam it is never just about the singing, even when it is. ‘Tracks of my Tears’ and this were, ostensibly, purely about the vocals, but at the same time they just weren’t. ‘Tracks…’ was just as much about the look, about Adam showing us that he could be all about the singing, as it was about the singing. This was as much about the performance as a whole as it was the singing. In its own way this was as much a piece of performance art as ‘Ring…’. The blue lighting, barely showing the singer, was like something you would see in a theatre production. The white trousers and shoes picked up the blue of the lighting and reflected it even more. The entire outfit was chosen to go with that lighting scheme, black/grey/greeny and white, nothing that would clash with the lights, only colours that would take on a new sheen because of it. For as simple as it looked this was as thought out and rehearsed as everything Adam’s done. In fact, the one performance that has come across as the most low key was last week’s, something that would make sense if it was a last minute change.
But the singing on this was perfect. Yes, there was that final note which was out of tune, he overshot for the note and it came out a little sharp but very quickly pulled it back down. I found it very interesting that in the rehearsal footage in the package at the end the note was perfect from the get go. I did however like the fact that he messed up. It proved that he isn’t perfect, that he can make mistakes like the rest of the contestants. Professional singers sometimes make mistakes in their songs, and it doesn’t matter if everything else is there. Yes, it can only be the occasional note or something small like that (or in the case of Barenaked Ladies when I saw them a few years ago it could be forgetting the lyrics to the song you’ve been singing for 17 years :-D) but if the performance is there nothing is lost. Not a single thing got was taken away from this performance because of that bum note. Some people are saying this season’s a foregone conclusion, (because that didn’t happen last year with Archuleta!!!), something I don’t for one second believe, but this mistake made him just that little bit more fallible and will hopefully have squashed that all a little bit.
For the first time tonight, and for the first time in any of Adam’s performances, it genuinely felt like Adam was living that song, had lived that song. Adam is a wonderful performer and does, as Allison did tonight, tend to perform the emotion of the song rather than genuinely feel it. And while this may be eminently more emotionally sensible and healthy it does leave a little something to be desired. Singing one song on a show is not the same as an entire concert night after night and I think that for the one song it would be nice to see a genuine emotional connection. But this week it really felt like that was his heart out there on his sleeve and on that stage, and THAT’S why Simon gave the standing ovation. Whether it was always going to happen or whether it had to do with the immense pressure Adam must have been feeling knowing he was singing after the time the show was meant to have already finished I do not know, but what we saw this week was a heart felt, emotional performance, that brought the truth of the song out.
This was a brilliant choice of song. The original is wonderful, the Gary Jules version is fabulous in its own right and this version was right up there with them. What they all have in common is they represent a feeling most of us have felt. The idea that we don’t fit in, that we don’t belong, is one of the most common feelings in the world. It’s right up there with falling in love. This is something absolutely everyone has experienced and probably continues to experience. And therefore we connect to the song, and so did Adam.
One note though. Once again this song was pretty heavily up there in Adam’s falsetto range. And this is a very pretty range. I would, however, like to hear a bit more of his lower vocals. There was a hint of them in this performance, and it appears to be a rich and vibrant sound, but I think to change it up next week it would be nice to hear that aspect of his voice. It would, after all, bring something completely different to the table once again.
OK, so I’m done for this week, although, as always, I might be back at some point before next week’s show. I can’t help but think on the possible choices for next week but before coming out and stating the obvious I’d like to think on it a little more. But I will say that if anyone ever is going to try Bjork’s ‘Play Dead’ from The Young American’s than this is the week, and year, to attempt it :-D.