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  • American Idol Season 11 – Who Makes The Top 3?

    I have to apologize for not writing about last week’s elimination of one Skylar Laine. I was out of town chaperoning my son and his classmates at his science camp. But I did write a bit of a recap for those of you who came into the season late at Popblerd. I wrote about last night’s performances as well.

    Last night’s show was a separation show. It was quite easy to separate the good from the bad. Jessica Sanchez and Joshua Ledet are head and shoulders above Phillip Phillips. And Phillip is head and shoulders above Hollie Cavanagh. When America eliminated Skylar Laine last week, it screwed up the possibility of maybe the best top four in American Idol history. Thanks for that voters.

    Check out the performances from Joshua and Jessica below if you didn’t watch last night’s show:

    Those performances cemented that Jessica and Joshua are my favorite twosome from any season of American Idol. I put together a poll to see what everyone else thought. Take the poll here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6C2RDNL.

    Now, onto the elimination show to see our top three.

    The crew performed California Dreaming at the start of the show. Ryno is going to have to do his ultimate stretch job tonight to get us through this hour. At least Jenny Lo is performing tonight. (So is David Cook.)

    He brings up Phillip Phillips first. Ryno pulled the move on him making him believe he made it, but he wasn’t going to give out the results just yet. Poor Double P looked quite embarrassed.

    Hollie was next and Jimmy Iovine pretty much called her out for being the worst of the four. I’ve been saying that all season long. Ryno won’t spoil it. We don’t know if she’s safe or not yet either. Looks like we’re waiting until the end for all of them.

    David Cook is performing his latest song. He probably doesn’t like Adam Lambert very much. If not for Lambert, he would’ve been the only good singer doing anything from the last five years of the show. But Lambert pretty much blows him away. I hope we see Lambert between here and the finale.

    Joshua is next and Jimmy basically called his version of It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World the best of the season.

    And finally, young Jessica comes to center stage. Jimmy didn’t think her Etta James song was the right move, but thought the Jennifer Holliday song was fantastic and said that Tommy Motolla told him she was the real deal. Please, keep Tommy Motolla away from young Jessica.

    It’s Jenny Lo time. She’s singing Dance Again. Okay, she’s probably not singing live. But she’s Jenny Lo. You don’t really watch her to hear her singing. You just watch her to watch her.

    The first person to make the top three is Jessica Sanchez. The next person in the top three is Joshua Ledet. Why do I have a feeling Phillip is leaving us? Please no. Please no.

    Phillip Phillips is through! And we have the strongest top three in quite some time. Jasmine Trias, I mean Hollie Cavanagh is gone.

    Seacrest out!

  • New Video! Daniel Martin Moore and Joan Shelley “First of August”

    New Video! Daniel Martin Moore and Joan Shelley “First of August”

    ''Farthest Field'', aka ''The Duets Project''
    One of the most haunting and lovely songs of 2011 was Kentucky-born singer-songwriter Daniel Martin Moore’s cover of Appalachian folk music pioneer Jean Ritchie’s “In the Cool of the Day”, which served as the title track to Moore’s sophomore solo album. Listening to it gives me the shivers every time. I’m not as taken with Moore’s originals, but when he sings a traditional hymn, you get a strong sense of someone brushing a layer of dust off a box of hard luck memories from the attic.

    In the not quite 18 months since that album’s release, Moore has kept himself plenty busy with the launch of his own record label, Ol Kentuck, to, in his words “help release some of the beautiful projects that I saw happening all around me.” The first such project was indeed very beautiful – a collection of lullabies by a female vocal trio called Maiden Radio.

    Maiden Radio “All the Pretty Little Horses” (2012)

    Moore’s latest project is a collection of duets he put together with Maiden Radio’s Joan Shelley. It’s another quiet, intimate album full of delicate, pastoral melodies called Farthest Field and was just released earlier this week. Here’s a video for the album’s first song:

    Daniel Martin Moore & Joan Shelley “First of August” (2012)

    You can listen to the whole album below. Right now, I think my favorite track of the bunch is the bluesy simmer “Sweetly By” with its rolling melody – Lover, come sweet and slowly, Lover come sweetly by – and great lead vocal by Joan. Talk about making love in the green grass.

  • Commercial-isms: JCPenney vs. Rosemary Clooney “On the First Warm Day”

    Also released in that brand new format, the ''45''
    It’s ten years ago this summer that jazz and pop singer Rosemary Clooney, (George’s dear aunt, and this dude‘s mom) died of lung cancer at the age of 74. But a new JCPenney ad is making sure she’s not forgotten.

    And like the retailer’s April ad featuring a little-known song by 60s teen pop star Lesley Gore (“Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows”), they’ve dug deep and come up with a lovely find – the perfect soundtrack for a morning spent potting pansies and pulling up those pesky thistles in the garden before the guy comes to deliver your five cubic feet of mulch. (I love the smell of cypress mulch in the morning.)

    Aww yeah: JCPenney’s new commercial features a 60-year-old b-side! The song’s called “On the First Warm Day”, and it first appeared as the flip side to Clooney’s 1952 78 rpm single for Columbia Records, “Botch-A-Me (Ba-Ba-Bacciami Piccina)” which charted all the way to #2 in its day.

    Rosemary Clooney “Botch-a-Me (Ba-Ba-Bacciami Piccina)” (1952)

    But even that huge hit is largely forgotten, having been overshadowed by another “ethnic” Italian novelty she recorded: “Mambo Italiano,” which has become to mob movies what Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” is to gay movies. I love that JCPenney is running with these lost oldies (what will they think of for June?). I’m a fan of Rosemary Clooney. One of my more recent CD acquisitions is a reissue of her 1956 album with Duke Ellington Blue Rose (featuring this swoony take on “Mood Indigo”). But I’d never heard “On the First Warm Day” until the JCPenney commercial.

    Rosemary Clooney “Mambo Italiano” (1954)

    Because I first associated Rosemary Clooney (born on May 23rd, in Maysville, Kentucky) with the goofier songs that she’s better known for (“Come On-a My House”, “Mambo Italiano”), I really became a fan of her more melancholy performances. One of my favorite Clooney songs is her gender-reversed take on the song “Hey There”, from the Adler & Ross musical The Pajama Game. The song itself was really inventive – a man having a heart-to-head chat with himself about the crush he’s got on that woman he knows from work (you know, the one who hates his guts). In the musical, he sings the verse into a dictaphone, then plays it back to himself, singing back to it in reply. In this performance, some background singers understudy for that dictaphone, but in the recording (which hit topped the pop charts for 6 weeks in the fall of ’54), she duets with herself.

    Rosemary Clooney “Hey There” (1954)

    I still love her sad songs best (and I still disdain the goofy ones), but I love the sense of joy she brings to “On the First Warm Day”. It doesn’t preclude the possibility of future sadness, but in its moment, it’s bright and hopeful: “we’ll teach those birds and bees a thing or twooooooo….” The song may not make me want to head right out to JCPenney, but it does make me want to browse their record collection.