Idol’s Elite Eight Try to Make You Love Them
Category Entertainment | Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
March Madness is over, but April Idolatry has just begun.
The American Idol field has been pared down to a mostly elite eight, give or take a few errant vocal cords, and Tuesday’s matchup had them singing songs from the year they were born.
With Danny Gokey being the eldest remaining contestant at 28 and Allison Iraheta bottoming out at 16, we’re talking tunes released between 1980 and 1992.
Did the Top Eight make the most of the gillion choices they had to choose from?
Well, some rogue always manages to get around those rather wide parameters by choosing a later version of a decades-old hit. Sure enough, Danny‘s song choice was so ’60s…
Danny Gokey: He was in danger of lapsing into easy-listening-remake territory by choosing Mickey Gilley‘s 1980 version of Ben E. King‘s “Stand by Me,” but Danny injected enough of a sexy rasp into the tune to make at least the beginning of his performance interesting, before the predictable “everybody sing!” vibe took over. His vocal was strong throughout, however, and the judges really liked it. Randy Jacksonloved it even though he didn’t care for the arrangement, and though Simon Cowell thought the middle part “was lazy,” he declared it great overall.